The Power Crunch and Firms’ Anticipatory Investment: Evidence from Manufacturing SMEs in China

Abstract

Using manufacturing survey data from China, we study the relationship between firms’ anticipatory investment (or in other words, willingness to invest) in the short-run future and their perception of the current power crunch for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Our findings reveal a robust and significant negative association, suggesting a sizable persistent negative impact of the power crunch on firms’ investment lingering over at least a couple of months. The dynamic impacts are very different at the industry level, with electricity-dependent industries appearing to take more hits. However, we find no statistically significant evidence to support the channel of electricity dependence in comparison with the channel of capacity utilization. Moreover, we show that firms of smaller size suffer disproportionately larger damage in future investment, which highlights the importance of caring about SMEs, relative to big firms.