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



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https://tapipedia.org/sites/default/files/economies-07-00103.pdf
DOI: 
10.3390/economies7040103
Licensing of resource: 
Rights subject to owner's permission
Type: 
journal article
Journal: 
Economies
Number: 
4
Pages: 
103-115
Volume: 
7
Year: 
2019
Author(s): 
Oyetunde-Usman Z.
Olagunju K. O.
Description: 

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.

Publication year: 
2019
Keywords: 
food security
technical efficiency
Nigeria
stochastic frontier model