본문 바로가기
  • Home
Basic Search

Satellite Nighttime Lights and Urban Resilience under Sanctions: A North Korean Case

  • Analyses & Alternatives
  • Abbr : A&A
  • 2026, 10(2), pp.5~42
  • DOI : 10.22931/aanda.2026.10.2.001
  • Publisher : Korea Consensus Institute
  • Research Area : Social Science > Social Science in general
  • Received : May 22, 2026
  • Accepted : June 15, 2026
  • Published : June 30, 2026

Dong Jun CHUN 1,  Baek, Jun Kee 2

1한국환경연구원
2한신대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

International sanctions and pandemic-era border closures rarely affect cities evenly, yet within-country distributional effects remain difficult to measure when the targeted state publishes no reliable sub-national statistics. This paper addresses the gap using a relatively underused approach in Korean studies and political economy: a high-frequency satellite nighttime-lights (NTL) panel applied to North Korea. Drawing on NASA's daily Black Marble product over 2012–2025 for sixteen cities, the analysis detects 285 power-disruption (PD) and 577 flood-inducing rainfall (FL) events, then computes eight resilience metrics per event under a fixed pre-sanctions baseline. City fixed-effects regressions compare resilience across three regimes (pre-sanctions 2012–2015, post-sanctions 2017–2019, post-COVID 2020–2025); inference is reported conservatively via exact-enumeration wild cluster bootstrap (WCB) over all 2⁴ = 16 sign patterns with G = 4 metropolitan clusters, alongside leave-one-cluster-out checks. Four findings emerge. First, a substantial capital-protection contrast in PD frequency: the Pyongyang-metropolitan cluster records 0.69 PD episodes per city-year against 2.49 in the east-inland cluster — a 3.6-fold rate gap that holds across alternative comparator schemes (illustratively, 17 events in the four most-protected core cities against 96 in the two most-exposed inland-border cities). Second, NTL responses to flood-inducing rainfall became larger during the post-sanctions period (impact +0.109, scarring +0.188), consistent with — though without direct infrastructure observation of — weakened drainage or response capacity. Third, NTL impacts of both event types contract under post-COVID conditions (PD impact −0.061; FL impact −0.318), which the analysis interprets primarily as reduced measured urban activity rather than improved resilience. Fourth, an exploratory heterogeneous-treatment pattern (HC3-based, not validated under WCB) suggests that politically protected, low-exposure cities show larger post-COVID PD impacts than high-exposure cities (interaction +0.073), consistent with prior sanctions-era adaptation among the latter; this pattern warrants further investigation. The paper also illustrates how daily satellite NTL, when combined with transparent event definitions and panel-based robustness checks, can supplement conventional sources of evidence in opaque-state political-economy research.

Statistics

  • 182 Viewed
  • 232 Downloaded

Tools

Issue List

Citation status

* References for papers published after 2025 are currently being built.

Basic Search Advanced Search