505 Economics: Monthly Sub-National GDP Dataset for Italy (granular, timely and precise)

505 Economics is on a mission to make academic economics accessible. We've developed the first monthly sub-national GDP data for EU and UK regions from January 2015 onwards. Our GDP dataset uses luminosity as a proxy for GDP. The brighter a place, the more economic activity that place tends to have. We produce the data using high-resolution night time satellite imagery and Artificial Intelligence. This builds on our academic research at the London School of Economics, and we're producing the dataset in collaboration with the European Space Agency BIC UK. We have published peer-reviewed academic articles on the usage of luminosity as an accurate proxy for GDP. Key features: - Granular: Data is provided at the following geographical units: - NUTS3 (e.g. Provinces), - NUTS2 (e.g. Regions), - NUTS1 (e.g. Macroregions), and - NUTS0 (e.g. Italy) levels. - Frequent: Data is provided every month from January 2015. This is more frequent than the annualised official datasets. - Timely: Data is provided with a one month lag (i.e. the data for January 2021 was published at the end of February 2021). This is substantially quicker than the 18 month lag of official datasets. - Accurate: Our dataset uses Deep Learning to maximise accuracy (RMSE 1.2%). The dataset can be used by: - Governments and policy makers - to monitor the performance of local economies, to measure the localised impact of policies, and to get a real-time indication of economic activity. - Financial services - to get an indication of national-level GDP before official GDP statistics are released - Engineering companies - to monitor and evaluate the localised impact of infrastructure projects - Consultancies - to forecast the localised impact of specific projects, to retrospectively monitor and evaluate the localised impact of existing projects - Economics firms - to create macro forecasts at the national and sub-national level, to assess the impact of policy interventions. - Academia / Think Tanks - to conduct novel research at the local level. E.g. our dataset can be used to measure the impact of localised COVID-19 lockdowns. We have created this dataset for all UK sub-national regions, 28 EU Countries and Switzerland.