For most emerging markets, there's nothing comparable to the per-track census data in the US (and other developed countries). Some fixed-line ISPs do market assessments by driving through neighborhoods and counting the number of cars and AC units in each house, as a proxy for income, and it is unlikely that better data will be available by traditional means any time soon.
I once had to compile a lot of per-city info on Indonesia, it involved a friend actually going into the national statistics office, spending several hours drinking tea with them, getting the actual raw survey data recorded into a CD (this was a couple years ago, not a couple decades) so I could eventually process it and get some results (despite the abundance of gaps and errors in the data).
In other words, Street View data is more pervasive, updated and readily available than data from the national statistics office.
For most emerging markets, there's nothing comparable to the per-track census data in the US (and other developed countries). Some fixed-line ISPs do market assessments by driving through neighborhoods and counting the number of cars and AC units in each house, as a proxy for income, and it is unlikely that better data will be available by traditional means any time soon.
I once had to compile a lot of per-city info on Indonesia, it involved a friend actually going into the national statistics office, spending several hours drinking tea with them, getting the actual raw survey data recorded into a CD (this was a couple years ago, not a couple decades) so I could eventually process it and get some results (despite the abundance of gaps and errors in the data).
In other words, Street View data is more pervasive, updated and readily available than data from the national statistics office.