دانلود رایگان مقاله انگلیسی قطع برق و عملکرد شرکت در کشورهای جنوب صحرای آفریقا - الزویر 2018

Abstract

In this paper we assess the extent to which power outages affect the sales of firms across different African economies. We address the potential endogeneity concerns endemic in much of the existing literature by constructing an instrument for power outages based on the varying share of electricity produced by hydro-power as a result of variation in the local climate conditions. Using firm-level data for 14 countries from the World Bank Enterprise Surveys, we find evidence of a negative relationship between an unreliable electricity supply and firms’ sales, with a stronger effect for firms that do not own a generator. We find that reducing average outage levels to those of South Africa would increase overall sales of firms in Sub-Saharan Africa by 85.1%, rising to 117.4% for firms without a generator.

Conclusions

In this paper we quantify the effect of power outages on firm sales taking into account endogeneity concerns by instrumenting for power outages. Our instrument choice is motivated by Africa’s increasing reliance on hydropower and the relationship between the stream-flow to a river that serves a hydropower plant and the power generated by that plant. As our results indicate, we do indeed find evidence of endogeneity indicating the importance of carefully addressing such endogeneity concerns. We also find that power outages have a significant impact on firm sales for firms without generators but find no effect for firms with generators. This latter finding perhaps suggests that the operation of firm-owned generators is not sufficiently expensive to impact upon firms’ performance. For firms without a generator, our 2SLS estimates indicate that if the average hours of outage could be reduced to that of the average South African firm in the sample, this would result in an increase in sales of 83%, or roughly $36 million in 2005 PPP. Similarly, if the number of outages fell by 73% (roughly the difference between an average firm and its South African counterpart) this would result in an increase in total sales of 117% for firms without a generator. The magnitude of these effects is notably larger than those estimated using OLS. The impact of outages does not differ in a statistically significant manner for small and large firms or for labor and capital intensive firms. We do find that non-exporters are affected by outages whereas exporters are not, perhaps reflecting the impact that outages may have on the local market and supply chain. We also find outages to have a statistically significant negative impact on firm profits and firm TFP.