Gas Station Index (GSI) Dataset
Description
This data publication contains three files related to the paper “Can We Measure from the Bottom Up? Constructing an Index of Gas Station Infrastructure to Identify Regional Economic Development”. The two .csv files, gsi_region_summary.csv and merged_gasstations_dataset.csv provide the results upon which the analysis is based. The regional summary file reports aggregated Gas Station Index (GSI) scores across 62 NUTS2/3 regions in nine European countries, while the merged dataset contains station-level observations and amenity attributes used in constructing the index. The accompanying GSI.zip file is a full replication package that includes the processing scripts and methodology pipeline necessary to reproduce the results. The central research hypothesis is that gas station infrastructure—measured through service quality, amenity density and variety, and accessibility—encodes systematic information about local purchasing power, mobility, and consumption, and can therefore serve as a reliable proxy for regional economic development. Using ~19,000 geospatially tagged gas stations, the GSI explains about 65% of cross-regional variation in GDP per capita. The data can be used to replicate the construction of the index, conduct robustness checks, and extend the methodology to other regions. By providing both station-level and region-level data, this dataset enables users to interpret the relationship between infrastructure nodes and economic outcomes, test alternative weighting schemes, and explore spatial development patterns such as transit corridors, capital city dominance, and peripheral stagnation.
Files
Institutions
- Saints Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje Faculty of Economics