Determinants of food security and technical efficiency among agricultural households in Nigeria

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-secur...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Economies 2019-12, Vol.7 (4), p.1-13
Main Authors: Oyetunde-Usman, Zainab, Olagunju, Kehinde Oluseyi
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Agriculture
Cassava
Corn
Crops
Developing countries
Efficiency
Farmers
Fertilizers
Food security
Households
LDCs
Nigeria
Productivity
Rice
Seeds
technical efficiency
Variables
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary: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.
ISSN:2227-7099
2227-7099
DOI:10.3390/economies7040103