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.
April 13, 2026
Original Paper
Electricity Load-Shedding, Threshold Effects, and Cross-Border Macroeconomic Spillovers in Sub-Saharan Africa
SSRN · 6452219
The Takeaway
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.
From the abstract
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