The Impact of Electricity Infrastructure Quality on Firm Productivity: Empirical Evidence from Southeast Asian Countries

Rapid economic growth in recent years has caused a surge in energy consumption among Southeast Asian countries and laid a considerable burden on the already inadequate power infrastructure. As a result, frequent blackouts and prolonged outages have become common and weakened firm productive performance in those years. The main objective of this study is to examine the impact of power infrastructure quality on the performance of Southeast Asian manufacturing firms. In this study, the World Bank Enterprise Surveys was employed as the training dataset of 4723 manufacturing firms in the period of 2015–2016. The results of this study reveal that industrial firms that suffered from power outages had consistently lower productivity. As measured by the length of such events, more severe outages tend to be more harmful to the firm. Furthermore, the findings also indicated that most firms relied on self-generated electricity to reduce the negative impact of power outages, but this does not bring many benefits when operating at a small scale in some countries. Consequently, this study contributes to a growing literature that examines the economic impact of public infrastructure and how detrimental the poor state of such services is to a firm’s downstream operations, productivity, and growth.