This paper introduces a new city-level panel dataset constructed using satellite nighttime light imagery and grid population data. The data contain over 1500 cities covering 43 Asian and Pacific countries/economies from 1992 to 2016. With the dataset, we perform a variety of analyses for the region as a whole as well as the five largest countries in the region. The exercise produces some novel evidence on several policy-relevant topics including urbanization status and patterns, relations between urbanization and economic growth, evolution of urban systems, primate cities, testing Zipf’s law and Gibrat’s law, the drivers of city growth, and emergence of city clusters.

本文介绍了使用卫星夜间光图像和网格人口数据构建的新的城市级面板数据集。数据包含1992年至2016年的1500多个城市，覆盖43个亚太国家/地区/经济体。借助数据集，我们对整个地区以及该地区五个最大的国家/地区进行了各种分析。该练习为与政策相关的几个主题提供了一些新颖的证据，包括城市化的现状和模式，城市化与经济增长之间的关系，城市系统的演化，灵长类城市，检验齐普夫定律和吉布拉特定律，城市增长的驱动力以及城市的兴起。集群。