Key points are not available for this paper at this time.
Energy shortage has a significant effect on businesses in developing countries. To overcome energy crises, such countries are adopting different strategies in their industrial sectors. This study contributes to the existing literature by analyzing the impact of energy crises on the profitability and productivity of 424 non-financial listed companies in Pakistan over the period 2001–2017. The fixed effect (FE) is used as a basic regression technique, while generalized method of moments (GMM) is used for the robust analysis. Seven measures, in which four measures of electricity shortfall (i.e., neutral period (NP), increasing shortfall (IS), worst shortfall (WS), decreasing shortfall (DS), energy consumption (EC), energy price (EP), and access to electricity (ATE)) were applied to examine their impact on profitability, that is, return on asset (ROA), return on equity (ROE), and productivity, that is, asset turnover ratio (ATO). The results confirmed the negative impact of energy crises on business profitability, where IS, WS, and DS significantly reduce profitability by 39%, 36%, and 33%, respectively. In addition, NP exerts a significantly positive impact on profitability, where a 1% increase in NP increases profitability by 33%. The results concluded that energy supply is highly critical for business profitability and productivity. This study puts forward several key policy implications that may be helpful for policymakers to overcome energy crises.
Xu et al. (Mon,) studied this question.