Firm performance in sub-Saharan Africa: What role do electricity shortages play?

Electricity outages affect the performance of firms in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) through a reduction in production capacity and over-reliance on backup generators, which raises the cost of production and render them uncompetitive. Based on this, we estimated the joint effect of electricity outage frequency and duration of outages on the performance of firms in SSA through the method of instrumental variable (IV). Employing firm-level data from the World Bank Enterprise Survey for 28 SSA countries from 2007 to 2018, the study found a unit increase in outage frequency and its duration combine to reduce yearly sales of firms in SSA by $114.9. Also, the study revealed that small-size firms in SSA incur $408.894 losses relative to large firms for every joint increase in outage frequency and outage duration largely because they cannot cope with electricity outages. Since electricity shortages persist in SSA, mitigation policies must target small firms as they are the worst affected by electricity outages.