A society that's used to things going wrong is actually way tougher and more resilient than one where everyone expects everything to work perfectly.
Research shows that countries experiencing their first taste of power outages suffer nearly five times more economic damage than countries where blackouts are a way of life. Once a system adapts to unreliability, the 'cost' of further instability paradoxically drops because everyone is already prepared for the worst.
Electricity Load-Shedding, Threshold Effects, and Cross-Border Macroeconomic Spillovers in Sub-Saharan Africa
SSRN · 6452219
This paper constructs the Electricity Load-Shedding Intensity Index (ELSII) for 40 sub-Saharan African countries from 2000 to 2024 and estimates its macroeconomic consequences using panel threshold regression and cross-sectional spatial analysis. The ELSII is derived through principal component analysis of electricity non-access rates and transmission and distribution losses from the WDI Indicators, providing a continuous, time-varying measure of electricity unreliability with broad panel covera