In Central Asia, a huge amount of informal trade takes place, usually involving undeclared activities across borders, in markets or bazaars. Although this 'shadow economy' provides significant employment opportunities, it is generally not recorded in official statistics and hurts law-abiding local firms that compete with undeclared goods.
The World Bank is helping to improve regional trade integration in Central Asia; part of this involves capturing the size of the informal trading sector, which could result in a leap forward in designing policies for border compliance and fiscal management.
An ESA EO Clinic team consisting of e-Geos (Italy), GAF (Germany) and Planetek Italia (Italy) is currently supporting the World Bank efforts by investigating how remote sensing methods can be used to observe inland bazaars in order to directly or indirectly estimate current and past informal trade. These novel Earth observation methods are detecting changes in the physical environment of the bazaars, for example counting vehicles in parking lots to estimate retailer revenues.
This image shows Dordoy Bazaar in the northeastern outskirts of Bishkek in Kyrgyzstan. The bazaar is one of Asia’s largest public markets. It is the white region at the centre of this image.