One of the many business-orientated indicators in the WDI looks at how long a new warehouse may expect to wait in practice to get hooked up with electricity, and therefore start fulfilling its intended function. Based on the available data, between 2009 (or the earliest available year) and 2018 the number of days needed to obtain a permanent electricity connection decreased in 109 countries, remained unchanged in 67, and increased in 12 economies. In some countries the time required to obtain electricity was reduced by more than 100 days.
In Sierra Leone, for example, it used to take 489 days to obtain an electrical connection in 2009 but only 82 days in 2018. Other countries which have drastically reduced the time needed for this procedure include Afghanistan, Tanzania, Guinea Bissau, and Bangladesh. However, over the same period it became more difficult to connect to electricity in a few economies. For instance, in Bulgaria it took 137 days to obtain an electrical connection in 2009 and 262 days in 2018. By comparison, in the country with the best performance on this topic, the United Arab Emirates, it takes only 10 days to obtain a permanent electricity connection for a warehouse.