Demand Analysis for Rice in Nigeria

摘要

The study examined demand analysis for rice in Edo, Delta and Lagos States of Nigeria using both primary and secondary data. To achieve this, the study examined the socio-economic characteristics of rice consuming households, estimated the complete demand functions for rice and the selected common food commodities and their price and expenditure elasticities in the study area. A multi-stage sampling technique was used to select households within the study area in the three states from 812 rice-consuming households using the Simple Random Sampling technique. Data collected were subjected to both descriptive and inferential statistics. The result of the descriptive statistics showed that rice constituted the largest share of the household total food expenditure, ranging between about 28 and 21% among the high income and urban household to 28 and 24% among the low income and rural households but mostly among the married and the medium-size male-headed households who had tertiary-education. The result of the multiple regressions showed that besides being a normal good, a necessity with no substitute, price inelastic, expenditure inelastic, rice took an average of 21.25% of the food budget share of a rice-consuming household for 1unit income and expenditure but increased budget share of rice by 6.05% for 1 increase in its unit price. The prices of beans, yam, garri and meat/fish were also significantly important in the share of rice in household total food expenditure at constant real income.