
Predict Economic Indicators with OpenStreetMap - merusame
https://janakiev.com/blog/osm-predict-economic-indicators/
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thinkingemote
This is an interesting analysis and can only really be accurate if we assume
the level of mapping and number of mappers in an area is the same from area to
area. I don't think this is true.

However, its possible statistics to find the number of mappers and the level
of activity in an area from OSM, so a better analysis should normalise for
this too.

But! This only considers OSM from the point of view of a "hobby mapper" \- the
old school view of individuals going out with GPS units. Today a growing
proportion mapping is contributed by governments, open data sets, batch
imports, businesses and mapping teams, all of which vary by geography too.

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grenoire
Yeah, 72 waste baskets in the entiretu of Bulgaria seems... unlikely.

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shirakawasuna
The fact that something is mapped at all is something of an economic
indicator, since OpenStreetMap mappers do the heavy lifting, are likely to be
big nerds with free time / retired, and are going to map their local areas
preferentially.

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notahacker
To a degree this is true, but they do find the abundance of some "amenities"
negatively correlated with national income, some of which, like "marketplace"
make more sense than others (like "hospital", at least until you consider not
all hospitals are equal and the state of the art ones tend to be big...). When
it comes to ATMs being more commonly depicted in lower income countries
(within the sample) it's an interesting question whether that's because they
actually are more common or whether they're more commonly marked on OSM
because locating them is more important to people in a cash economy (cf most
of the ATMs near me are unmarked)

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stult
>like "hospital", at least until you consider not all hospitals are equal and
the state of the art ones tend to be big...

I'm willing to bet this and possibly some of the other amenity correlations
are driven either by a few outliers, some uncontrolled confounding variables,
or by measurement error.

E.g. if one of the poorer nations has a strange policy or linguistic quirk
around the definition of hospital, that could be driving up the total number
of locations marked as hospital and thus introducing some hidden bias.

In terms of confounding variables, I'm just taking a guess in the dark, but
hospitals per capita is probably a strong proxy measure of how rural a country
is. The more rural the population, the more hospitals are required to serve
the same number of people, because hospitals need to be close for emergency
situations.

Also, there's probably a selection bias. Hospitals are likely one of the first
things to get put on OSM for a given area. Because there aren't many of them
and they tend to be one of the most important items people are looking for on
a map. So poorer countries, with fewer OSM users, are more likely to have
hospitals marked relative to the other amenities.

Meaning, you could have a negative relationship between __all __amenities and
GDP /GNI/HDI, but only hospitals and other items consistently marked across
all countries is being measured well enough to demonstrate this. Even though
naively one might assume more amenities/person is better, it's possible for
many amenities that centralization/consolidation actually correlates with
better economic performance. Obviously that's probably not true of park
benches, but it might be for schools, hospitals, and other public
infrastructure.

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shady-lady
Step 1 should be verify the information you're counting as facts.. re:
McDonalds & ingredients

> This means the same items are made in the same way with the same ingredients
> in very different economies around the world, making the Big Mac...

This is provably not true. (without any prejudice against BigMac as PPP
indicator)

[https://www.huffingtonpost.com/the-daily-meal/big-macs-
aroun...](https://www.huffingtonpost.com/the-daily-meal/big-macs-around-the-
world_b_3714396.html?slideshow=true#gallery/311883/1)

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stephengillie
Open-source map providers have no economic incentive to guide drivers down
streets containing the businesses who pay more.

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John_KZ
The idea of using (mappable/recordable) public amenities per capita as a
measure of prosperity is good.

However, even discounting for the massive regional biases in OSM mapping,
having 10 universities per capita doesn't mean anything. The qualitative part
is extremely important on all aspects. Universities, hospitals, parks, even
benches..

Using aerial photography you can probably infer things about the quality of
the roadwork and efficiency of transportation, parking space availability,
recreational park "quality", rooftop utilization etc. But with
incomplete/heavily biased mapping and no quality index this is pretty much
useless.

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Someone
As it stands, all metrics include a hidden “quality of OpenStreetMap data”
feature that may explain significant fractions of the significance of
features.

So, I think they should try to compensate for that. How? I wouldn’t know.

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maxerickson
It may be more interesting to work in the other direction, where the
comparison with the economic data is used to estimate the quality of the OSM
data.

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doombolt
Their second strong correlator is bicycle parking. Meaning you really have to
understand the context for such correlations.

