Ўзбекистон иқтисодчилари XIII форуми

Data and Methodology. 
We carry out our research study based on 2019 round of the World Bank 
Enterprise Survey. The firm-level survey provides an information on private firm’s characteristics, gender 
and workforce composition, indebtedness, annual sales, cost of inputs and labour, bribery, licensing, 
infrastructure, trade, crime, competition, capacity utilisation, innovation and technology, and performance 
indicators [38]. 
To estimate the direct effects of power outage on firms’ total annual sales, we follow the 
methodology used in previous studies using cross-sectional data. 
 
Where is a vector of observed variables on the 
cross-sectional unit, 
is the error term, is a 
vector of unknown parameters, is a scalar. 
In our econometric model, a key dependent variable is the log of total annual sales that repres ents 
logarithmic form of total annual sales observed in last financial year. Key independent variables are power 

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outage hours and annualised hours which shows total duration of electricity outages observed during a month 
(or year) estimated as the number of experienced electricity loss multiplied by the duration of the outage 
(multiplied by 12 to estimate for a year). Also, we consider an ownership of a power generator by the firm. 
In addition, we control for other relevant variables as suggested by other empirical studies, such as product 
innovation, process innovation, international certificate representing if a firm possesses an internationally-
recognized quality certification, firm age, competition stands for whether the number of a firm’s competitors 
in the main market exceeds 100, finance the variable indicates if a firm has a credit line or a loan from a 
financial institution, export, formal training, female top manager. Furthermore, we control for region, sector, 
and firm size, which is classified in line with the number of employees: micro (
), small 
(
), medium (
), and large (
). 
Empirical results 
On average, firms in the sample experience roughly 18.54 hours of electricity outage during a month 
(see
Table 1
 in Appendix), while 14.5% of firms own a power generator. Around 29.5% of firms carried 
out product innovations, whereas 17.3% of those firms carried out process innovations. Average age of firms 
is roughly 12 years and 36.1% surveyed firms reported high degree of competition with more than 100 
competitors in the market. 
Empirical results suggest (