Power outages and economic growth in Africa

Thomas Barnebeck Andersen and Carl-Johan Dalgaard ()

No 7/2012, Discussion Papers of Business and Economics from Department of Business and Economics, University of Southern Denmark

Abstract: This paper estimates the total effect of power outages on economic growth in Sub-Saharan Africa over the period 1995-2007. Outages are instrumented using a satellite-based measure of lightning density. As suggested by Henderson et al. (2011), we also combine Penn World Tables GDP data with satellite-based data on nightlights to arrive at a more accurate measure of economic growth. Our results suggest that the annual economic growth drag of a weak power infrastructure is about 2 percentage points.

Keywords: Economic growth; public utilities; electricity; earthlights; Africa (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H40 O10 O40 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-afr and nep-ene
Date: 2012-02-28
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