Carlos MendezGeospatial development · Sustainability
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On the geography of development

Monitoring Local Development
from outer space.

Our mission is to promote interdisciplinary science for economic, social, and environmental sustainability. We integrate insights from development economics, spatial data science, and applied econometrics to understand and inform the process of sustainable development.

Keynote presentation
Learn the methods
Carlos MendezAssociate Professor · Nagoya University, Japan
Earth at night, showing the distribution of city lights across Asia and surrounding regions. Earth at night VIIRS / 2016 · QuaRCS network Earth at night · Asia
Explore the questions

Video Overview

01Map disparities02Explain regional change03Inform sustainable development

01 / THE RESEARCH QUESTIONS

Why do subnational regions follow different development paths?

Satellite observations reveal patterns. Spatial econometrics, causal inference, and machine learning help us investigate the forces behind them.

The QuaRCS Network is an international and interdisciplinary research network in Quantitative Regional and Computational Science.

Five connected research areas

  • Sustainable regional development
  • The geography of development
  • Regional growth and inequality
  • Spatial structural change
  • Spatial energy economics
Explore the QuaRCS network

NIGHTTIME LIGHTS

Map human activity

Explore the geography of nighttime lights and discover how economic activity is distributed across places.

Explore the map

CHANGE OVER TIME

Follow regional change

Compare luminosity across regions and over time. Start with a pattern, then ask what might explain it.

Explore the trends

POPULATION & PLACE

Put places in context

Explore population patterns alongside the geography of light to frame new questions about people and development.

Explore population
Carlos Mendez
NAGOYA, JAPAN / 35° N

02 / BEHIND THE RESEARCH

Economics meets
spatial data science.

I’m Carlos Mendez, Associate Professor of Development Economics at Nagoya University, Japan. My research aims to integrate development economics, spatial data science, and applied econometrics to understand and inform the process of sustainable development.

My current research

  • Geospatial inequality, poverty, and growth interactions
  • Geospatial big data analytics and impact evaluation
  • Regional infrastructure, natural disasters, and structural change
Download CV Academic profile

QUARCS LAB / NAGOYA

Meet the QuaRCS lab.

Our lab brings researchers and students together to study regional development through economics, spatial data, and computational methods.

Alumni
Abdulah Rusli (Indonesia) Abdulah Rusli (Indonesia)PhD student 2023-2027 Bimo Arvianto (Indonesia) Bimo Arvianto (Indonesia)PhD student 2025-2028 Cesar Echevarria (Peru) Cesar Echevarria (Peru)PhD student 2024-2027 Favio Leiva Cárdenas Favio Leiva CárdenasPhD student 2023-2027 He Du (China) He Du (China)PhD Student, 2025 to 2028 Laura Constanza Prieto Granados (Colombia) Laura Constanza Prieto Granados (Colombia)PhD student 2026-2029 Li Xiaomeng (China) Li Xiaomeng (China)PhD student 2025-2028 Mujkanovic Adin (Bosnia and Herzegovina) Mujkanovic Adin (Bosnia and Herzegovina)Master student 2025-2027 Phon Sophat (Cambodia) Phon Sophat (Cambodia)PhD student 2024-2027 Sour Heng (Cambodia) Sour Heng (Cambodia)PhD student 2023-2026

Recent presentations

All presentations

Date TBA Conference presentation — venue and date to be announced (2026)

Predicting and monitoring local development from outer space

Predicting fifteen SDG indices for 339 Bolivian municipalities from nighttime lights and AlphaEarth daytime embeddings, and combining both satellite views to monitor local development clusters and spatial development traps.

Invited lecture, Universidad Católica Boliviana "San Pablo", La Paz

Sustainable Development, Space Technology, and Data Science

Invited lecture (in Spanish) on how satellite imagery and spatial data science can measure, predict, and explain uneven development.

Keynote Speaker, Annual Meeting of the Nagoya University Alumni Association, Thailand Branch

AI-Assisted Learning and Research: Production, Verification, and Tool Integration

Keynote Speaker, Annual Meeting of the Nagoya University Alumni Association, Thailand Branch

04 / TOOLS FOR DISCOVERY

Tools for your next research question.

Explore regional data, compare places, and turn economic questions into reproducible analysis with open research software.

All projects

Project 2026

expdpy

What patterns and relationships hide in your panel data? expdpy reveals them in Python, with Plotly figures, publication tables, and no-code Streamlit apps.

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Project 2026

geometrics

Are poorer regions catching up, and is inequality falling? geometrics answers with spatial methods in Python, Plotly figures, and no-code Streamlit apps.

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Project 2026

scspill

Did a policy really work if it also affected the comparison regions? scspill, a Python package, estimates both the true effect and the spillover to them.

Explore project

05 / THE OPEN CLASSROOM

Build your research toolkit.

Learn to map disparities, analyze regional change, and evaluate policy with practical tutorials in Python, R, and Stata. Work through the methods, then bring them to your own research.

All tutorials
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