Blackouts are costing the Lebanese economy about $3.9 billion per year, or roughly 8.2 percent of the country's GDP

Robert Bryce's A Question of Power: Electricity and the Wealth of Nations. Public Affairs, March 17, 2020, ISBN-13: 978-1610397490

Excerpts about the situation in Lebanon (as Tyler Cowen mentions in his site, https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/10/the-generator-mafia-in-lebanon.html):

...blackouts are costing the Lebanese economy about $3.9 billion per year, or roughly 8.2 percent of the country's GDP.

I asked why the Lebanese government can't put the private generators out of business.  He replied that EdL [the state-owned electricity company] is losing some $1.3 billion per year, while the private generators are taking in as much as $2 billion per annum.  "It's a huge business," he said, "and it's very dangerous to interfere with this business."

...Nakhle, an official in the Energy Ministry, was admitting that the generator mafia bribes Lebanese politicians to make sure that EdL stays weak and blackouts persist...

Maya Ammar, a model and architect in Beirut...told me, "The one reason is Lebanon that we do not have electricity is corruption, plain and simple."...The electric grid, she continued, is "a microcosmic example of how this country runs."