# I – Introduction

## I.I – Monitoring Electricity Reliability

Sustainable Development Goal 7 aims to ensure universal access to affordable, reliable, and modern energy services by 2030. Electricity outages have serious negative consequences on wellbeing, productivity, and livelihoods. Best-practice monitoring systems in upper-income countries rely on sophisticated monitoring equipment that relay detailed information on the provision of electricity service to users. However, such systems are absent in most developing countries, and even where the infrastructure is present, the data are only seldom reliable and publicly available.

To address data gaps, outages, and the constraints service disruptions impose on users, are often monitored using surveys. Data collection efforts as diverse as the World Bank Enterprise Surveys, the U.S. Consumer Expenditure Survey, Living Standards Measurement Surveys, and a wide range of theme-specific research surveys all collect data on electricity outages for the purposes of understanding the effects of electricity outages on economic and social outcomes. In most cases, these surveys collect information by means of traditional recall methods.

However, survey data that identify electricity outages are subject to imprecision arising from several sources and establishing the effects of outages is often complicated by shortcomings in measurement. Some of the better-known challenges relate to recency, recall, desirability, and rounding biases. The imprecision that arises from these errors can have practical consequences for policy in several ways. For instance, outage monitoring is often used as a measure of accountability, and imprecision or bias in reporting could lead to inefficient management of resources. Likewise, systematic reporting bias between consumer subgroups could generate inefficiencies in the allocation of scarce resources. Biases in consumer perceptions could also lead to invalid estimates of the impact or potential outcomes of policy reform.

There is empirical evidence in the consumer behavior literature that systematic reporting differences may be a concern when using surveys for accountability purposes. Levanon et al. (2015), for instance find that across 12 countries, consumers with high social status tended to register more service failures and to complain more frequently than customers of lower social status. In the literature on power sector reform, many analyses recommend taking political economy considerations into account (Sulistiyanto and Xun 2004; Victor and Heller 2007; Erdogdu 2013).

This study uses data from unbiased electricity outage monitoring devices that collected detailed information alongside survey-based measures. Comparing the automated measures to survey-based measures demonstrates the presence and extent of bias in survey-based reporting of electricity outages in a developing country setting.

The results suggest that bias in reporting electricity outages in Tajikistan primarily takes the form of underreporting outages of short duration. Respondents systematically report fewer instances of electricity outages, and when they do report an outage as having occurred, on average report that it lasted less long than was truly the case. However, the results also suggest that the direction of bias changes during periods of widespread outages of significant duration. During such episodes, 2