Electricity availability: A precondition for faster economic growth?

Rohan Best and Paul Burke ()

CAMA Working Papers from Centre for Applied Macroeconomic Analysis, Crawford School of Public Policy, The Australian National University

Abstract: We investigate if greater electricity availability helps countries ascend to faster economic growth trajectories. This is an important question for many developing countries that are currently prioritizing infrastructure investments. Using cross-sectional and panel regressions with national-level decadal data, we find some evidence that electricity availability has a significant effect on subsequent economic growth. However, much of the effect disappears once suitable controls are included. We examine various dimensions of electricity availability, including electricity consumption quantity, generation capacity, residential access rate, and quality of electricity supply. It appears that electricity availability is best viewed as something that can be scaled up as economies grow rather than something that imposes binding constraints on subsequent economic growth.

Keywords: electricity availability; electricity consumption; economic growth; development economics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O47 Q43 Q48 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 28 pages
Date: 2018-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ene, nep-gro, nep-knm and nep-reg
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (24)

Downloads: (external link)
https://cama.crawford.anu.edu.au/sites/default/fil ... _2018_best_burke.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Electricity availability: A precondition for faster economic growth? (2018)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:een:camaaa:2018-30

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CAMA Working Papers from Centre for Applied Macroeconomic Analysis, Crawford School of Public Policy, The Australian National University Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Cama Admin ().