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Economic impacts of capital city relocation in Myanmar

Nature Cities volume 2, pages 299–303 (2025)Cite this article

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Abstract

A common economic motivation for relocating a country’s capital city is to mitigate big-city problems in the former capital and foster economic growth in the new capital. Analyzing the relocation of Myanmar’s capital city, we find that the economic losses in the former capital outweigh the near-term gains in the new one. In addition, the relocation does not promptly curb urban sprawl or air pollution in the former capital.

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Fig. 1: Changes in the nighttime lights in the two capital regions and across Myanmar.
Fig. 2: Parallel trends and causal effects of capital relocation on nighttime lights, urban land area and AOD.

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Data availability

The primary data used in this study are publicly accessible and available for download or use from the following sources: Version 4 DMSP-OLS Nighttime Lights Time Series from the Earth Observation Group of NOAA NCEI (https://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/eog/dmsp/downloadV4composites.html), Climate Change Initiative Land Cover products from ESA (https://www.esa-landcover-cci.org), MCD19A2 V6.1 data product from NASA LP DAAC at the USGS EROS Center (https://developers.google.com/earth-engine/datasets/catalog/MODIS_061_MCD19A2_GRANULES 061 MCD19A2 GRANULES), and LandScan Global from Oak Ridge National Laboratory (https://landscan.ornl.gov). The country shapefiles used in the analysis can be accessed through DIVA-GIS (https://diva-gis.org/data.html) and geoBoundaries (https://www.geoboundaries.org/countryDownloads.html). The processed data applied in this study have been deposited on GitHub at https://github.com/linhtetaung-cloud/capital_city.

Code availability

The empirical analyses are conducted using StataSE 18, and the corresponding code scripts are available in the public repository on GitHub at https://github.com/linhtetaung-cloud/capital_city.

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Acknowledgements

We acknowledge the funding support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (number 72103220) to H.Y. X.H. gratefully acknowledges the Chinese Government Scholarship Program. We extend our sincere gratitude to the Earth Observation Group, the Climate Change Initiative, the NASA LP DAAC, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, DIVA-GIS, and geoBoundaries for their efforts in making the data publicly accessible, which were instrumental in supporting this research.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Finance and Economics, Central University of Finance and Economics, Beijing, China

    Xiaochen Huang & Haosheng Yan

  2. School of Public Policy and Management, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China

    Zebang Zhang

Authors
  1. Xiaochen Huang
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  2. Haosheng Yan
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  3. Zebang Zhang
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Contributions

X.H. was responsible for data extraction, processing and empirical analysis, and contributed to drafting and writing the paper. H.Y. designed the study, conducted empirical analysis, and contributed to drafting and writing the paper. Z.Z. contributed to conducting empirical analysis and writing of the paper.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Haosheng Yan.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Nature Cities thanks Brian Quistorff, Vadim Rossman and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Supplementary information

Supplementary Information (download PDF )

Supplementary Figs. 1 and 2, Sections 1–6 and Tables 1–5.

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Source data

Source Data Fig. 1 (download TIF )

Unprocessed data for visualizing the difference in nighttime lights in Myanmar between 2001 and 2008.

Source Data Fig. 2 (download CSV )

Processed data on nighttime lights, urban land area, AOD and township characteristics for all 286 townships in Myanmar, spanning from 1997 to 2009.

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Huang, X., Yan, H. & Zhang, Z. Economic impacts of capital city relocation in Myanmar. Nat Cities 2, 299–303 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44284-025-00217-x

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