Operation Status Comparison Monitoring of China’s Southeast Asian Industrial Parks before and after COVID-19 Using Nighttime Lights Data

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Different from day time remote sensing, nighttime light remote sensing provides a unique perspective on human social activities, thus it has been widely used for spatial data mining of socioeconomic domains. Findings in the manuscript can partially reveal impact of COVID-19 on China's Southeast Asian Industrial Parks, but this study still have some shortcomings, details are listed as follow:

 

Major issues： 

1. This paper explores the impact of COVID-19 on China's Southeast Asian Industrial Parks by using nighttime light data, NLD can reflect a number of socioeconomic indicators, Which aspect of the impact? And the title of the paper is not obvious enough on this.

 

2. I believe lots of studies have applied the similar kind of data to investigate similar research questions, so what’s the research gap can be filled by this study? Authors need to distinguish this study from previous studies more clearly.

 

3. Why this paper chooses ‘Twelve CIPSAs in Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and Malaysia’? I think the author needs to show the geographical location and scope of the Twelve CIPSAs in a map.

 

4. In the paper, the width of buffer zones is 10 KM, and different Industrial Park’s land use land-use type also is different, so the buffer zone’s width of each Industrial Park is variational?

 

5. Two of five results introduced in the abstract can also be obtained from fundamental inference, such as “COVID-19 had a significant impact on the operation of the 11 CIPSA parks”. As a reviewer, I am looking forward to interesting results that can only be obtained from the NLD.

 

Minor issues：

1. In capter 2.2.2, Whether data preprocessing can supplement a flow chart?

 

2. The 12 small pictures in Figure 1 are missing numbers

 

3. The impacts of COVID-19 on foreign enterprises maybe may be related to COVID-19 prevention and control measures, Whether the degree of participation of this factor be considered?

 

4. In the conclusions, COVID-19 had a significant impact on the operation of the 11 CIPSA parks, Whether the impact is economic activity, population activity or others?

Author Response

Dear Reviewer                                                   21^st January, 2022

 

Enclosed is the revised version of the paper entitled “Operation Status Comparison Monitoring of China's Southeast Asian Industrial Parks before and after COVID-19 Using Nighttime Lights Data”. We appreciate the very useful comments from you. We agree with your suggestions and have revised the manuscript accordingly. Below is our response to your comments resulting in a number of clarifications.

 

Regards

 

Dr. Mingquan Wu

[email protected]

Author Response File: Author Response.doc

Reviewer 2 Report

This paper has a straightforward objective, namely to measure the effect of the covid-19 pandemic on several industrial park in SE Asia.

Originality of the work is limited since this has already been done, and is to some extend mention in the introduction of the paper. Hence, I'm really not sure what remains to be published on the topic. Authors do not indicate to readers what the originality of the work is, or the gap in the literature.

 

I have a number of issues with this paper that concern the design of the research, the data used, and the methods of analysis.

 

1. Scientific papers classically include a section on the review of the literature. Here the literature is folded in the introduction, and is rather shallow. There is a huge body of literature on NTL and its ability to measure GDP. Very little of it is reviewed here. There are a number of issues with using NTL to estimate GDP. These are well documented in the literature and should be carefully reviewed here.
2. Objectives should be announced earlier in the intro, like at the end of the first paragraph.
3. The should be a clear discussion of the research design before getting into the data and the methods. This should be closely tied to the objectives.
4. Why use monthly data and not weekly data? Both NTL data and covid data are available; this would avoid smoothing the data temporally too much, could enable the identification of crisper relationships, and provide more data points for statistically more reliable analysis.
5. Aside from the mentioned concerns about temporal granularity, I also have concerns about the spatial resolution. Why have a 10 km buffer around parks? Also, Covid-19 data are for entire countries, whose size could be 2 or 3 orders of magnitude larger than the parks. The state of the pandemic close to parks may be EXTREMELY different from what the national value indicate. We all know that scale matters, so observations must be defined consistently.
6. On data: authors should communicate the land area of parks, the number of pixels, the portion of pixels tossed because of cloud cover, variability of NTL values inside the parks and their variability through time, etc. I am perplexed that authors didn't see fit to fully disclose all this information to readers.
7.  In Table 2: "what it affected"? What criterion is used to determine whether a park is affected? What cut off? How much of a drop is there between 2019 and 2020? Telling readers there is a drop is not sufficient, as this may be by chance. So, authors here and later in the paper should think of providing a measure of significance.
8. L. 231-232: Authors indicate that for a specific park in Malaysia, the 2020 NTL curve is below 2019. However, this is really far from evident by just looking at the curves! OK, until october, but them things break lose. Until october, infections were very small as well though, so maybe there were other factors at play. Honestly, I don't see a relationship between infections and GDP loss / NTL drop in these charts. Also, authors should clearly tell readers which chart to look at.
9. Analysis in section 3.1.2 is very superficial. Not convincing at all. Authors should explicitly do some correlation over time. Maybe using weekly data instead of monthly to have more data points.
10. It seems to me that using a 10K buffer smooths out sharper differences in NTL that are due to covid, which would here be averaged out over a larger number of pixels, including much more heterogenous land uses, particularly the park and whatever happens to be in the 10 km around it. the ability to capture the effect of covid because of nearby other land uses, like housing?
11. In 3.2.1. to best sort out the effects of the industrial parks vs the rest, the 2 should be treated separately. Park and 10k buffer separately not together.
12. Discussion is ok, but I find that authors spend a lot of time finding relationships where are are not, or where relations are weak. Whatever relationship would exist has been largely smoothed out because of the coarse spatial and temporal resolution of the analysis. I strongly advise authors to redo the analysis to get stronger results rather than struggle to make a case on the basis of weak results. AS it is, this is not good science. 

Author Response

Dear Reviewer                                                   21^st January, 2022

 

Enclosed is the revised version of the paper entitled “Operation Status Comparison Monitoring of China's Southeast Asian Industrial Parks before and after COVID-19 Using Nighttime Lights Data”. We appreciate the very useful comments from you. We agree with your suggestions and have revised the manuscript accordingly. Below is our response to your comments resulting in a number of clarifications.

 

Regards

 

Dr. Mingquan Wu

[email protected]

Author Response File: Author Response.doc

Reviewer 3 Report

A good English writing was presented. The work is meaning to gain the COVID-19 influence on the China's Southeast Asian industrial parks and their buffer zones with four ratio parameters.

Comments:

1. In this paper 12 industrial parks were selected as the research objects. But the detailed information, such as the latitude, longitude and specific area, cannot be found in the article, reference or link provided in section 2.1. Considering the spatial resolution of EOG VIIRS DNB data, the study area is an important parameter to the calculation accuracy of the monthly mean NTL. I think you can supplement the related information in Table 1.
2. I was confused with the specific concept of buffer zone in this article. Does the surrounding 10 km buffer zone in this article include its corresponding industrial park? What’s the specific spatial position relationship between them? I suggest adding a spatial position diagram, which will be very helpful to the understanding of the article.
3. In line 268~270, you found that the SCDZ park was the only park with a greater NTL value in 2020 than in 2019, and gave the corresponding explanation. As far as I know, the reasons behind this phenomenon are complex. Some studies, for example, attributed the NTL increase to the improvements in air quality. For your explanation (under construction), you should provide more evidence, such as the remote sensing image, references, or something else.
4. How was the table 2 obtained? By investigation or the calculation results of these four formulas? Based on my understanding of these formulas, I don’t think table 2 can be obtained by using these four ratio parameters. Please give more information about it.
5. In the future, the influence of accuracy of the EOG VIIRS DNB data on the calculation results can be considered in the next work.

 

Author Response

Dear Reviewer                                                   21^st January, 2022

 

Enclosed is the revised version of the paper entitled “Operation Status Comparison Monitoring of China's Southeast Asian Industrial Parks before and after COVID-19 Using Nighttime Lights Data”. We appreciate the very useful comments from you. We agree with your suggestions and have revised the manuscript accordingly. Below is our response to your comments resulting in a number of clarifications.

 

Regards

 

Dr. Mingquan Wu

[email protected]

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

The comments are addressed. I can accept the manuscript as it is now.