Estimating Local Agricultural GDP across the World

Economic statistics are frequently produced at an administrative level such as the sub-national division. However, these measures may not adequately capture the local variation in the economic activities that is useful for analyzing local economic development patterns and the exposure to natural disasters. Agriculture GDP is a critical indicator for measurement of the primary sector, on which 60 percent of the world's population depends for their livelihoods. Through a data fusion method based on cross-entropy optimization, this paper disaggregates national and subnational administrative statistics of Agricultural GDP into a global gridded dataset at approximately 10 * 10 kilometers using satellite-derived indicators of the components that make up agricultural GDP, namely crop, livestock, fishery, hunting and timber production. The paper examines the exposure of areas with at least one extreme drought during 2000 to 2009 to agricultural GDP, where nearly 1.2 billion people live. The findings show an estimated USD 432 billion of agricultural GDP circa 2010