EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Power outages and economic growth in Africa

Thomas Andersen and Carl-Johan Dalgaard

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

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)
Pages: 14 pages
Date: 2012-02-28
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-afr and nep-ene
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.sdu.dk/-/media/files/om_sdu/institutte ... _2012/dpbe7_2012.pdf Full text (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Power outages and economic growth in Africa (2013) Downloads
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:hhs:sdueko:2012_007

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Papers on Economics from University of Southern Denmark, Department of Economics Department of Economics, University of Southern Denmark, Campusvej 55, DK-5230 Odense M, Denmark. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Astrid Holm Nielsen ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-30
Handle: RePEc:hhs:sdueko:2012_007