Determinants of Food Security and Technical Efficiency among Agricultural Households in Nigeria

Zainab Oyetunde-Usman and Kehinde Oluseyi Olagunju
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Zainab Oyetunde-Usman: Natural Resources Institute, University of Greenwich, Chatham Maritime, Kent ME4 4TB, UK
Kehinde Oluseyi Olagunju: Agricultural and Food Economics Branch, Agri-Food and Biosciences Institute, 18a Newforge Lane, Belfast BT9 5PX, UK

Economies, 2019, vol. 7, issue 4, 1-13

Abstract: The challenge of food security in Nigeria hinges on several factors of which poor technical efficiency is key. Using a stochastic frontier framework, we estimated the technical efficiency of agricultural households in Nigeria and tested for the significance of mean technical efficiency of food-secure and food-insecure agricultural households. We further assessed the determinants of agricultural households’ inefficiencies within the stochastic frontier model and adopted a standard probit model to assess the determinants of households’ food security status. The results of our analyses revealed that; on the overall, the agricultural households had a mean technical efficiency of 52%, suggesting that agricultural households have the tendency of improving their technical efficiency by 48% using the available resource more efficiently. We found that households that are food-secure are more technically efficient than food in-secure households and this was significant at one-percent. Our results provide useful insights into the role of land size and number of assets as determinants of agricultural households’ food security and technical efficiency status.

Keywords: food security; technical efficiency; Nigeria (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E F I J O Q (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (12)

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