Electricity Supply Reliability and Firm Growth in Liberia: Evidence from the 2025 World Bank Enterprise Survey

Reliable electricity is a productive input whose interruption can reduce operating hours, damage equipment, interrupt digital services and force firms to purchase costly backup power. This article examines the relationship between electricity supply reliability and firm growth in Liberia using firm-level data from the 2025 World Bank Enterprise Survey. The dataset contains 158 formal manufacturing and service establishments. Survey-weighted descriptive statistics show that 64.5% of firms experienced outages during the most recent fiscal year, while 90.5% owned or shared a generator. Among firms reporting outage frequency, the typical establishment experienced a median of 10 outages per month, and the median interruption lasted approximately four hours and thirty minutes. Annualised sales and employment growth are constructed from current and three-year retrospective values. Weighted least-squares models with heteroskedasticity-robust standard errors control for firm size, sector, location, age, managerial experience, access to loans and innovation. Outage exposure is negatively associated with sales growth, but the coefficient is not statistically significant at conventional levels. It is positively but insignificantly associated with employment growth. Large firms and firms outside Montserrado record significantly slower sales growth, while older firms record significantly slower employment growth. The results suggest that unreliable electricity remains a widespread operating constraint, but simple outage exposure alone does not fully explain heterogeneous firm growth. Policy should therefore combine improvements in grid reliability with affordable productive-use electricity, cleaner backup options and firm-level measures that reduce vulnerability to interruptions.