This study develops a new city-level panel dataset using satellite nighttime light imagery and grid population data for over 1,500 cities in 43 economies in Asia and the Pacific from 1992 to 2016.

With the dataset, the author performs a variety of analyses on Asia and the Pacific as a whole as well as individually for five countries in the region—India, Indonesia, Japan, Pakistan, and the People’s Republic of China. The study presents novel evidence on inter-related 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.