Department of Agricultural Economics, University of Agriculture, Makurdi, Benue State, Nigeria
Online published on 5 December, 2018.
The potential of sesame in the attainment of foreign exchange earnings made its increased production an important priority in the Agricultural Transformation Agenda (ATA) of the Federal Government of Nigeria. This paper estimated the supply response of sesame output to own price and non-price factors over the period 1966–2016 using co-integration and Vector Error Correction Model (VECM) techniques. Results indicated that the essential data series were not stationary and are all integrated of order one, that is I (1). The Johansen multivariate cointegration approach indicated the presence of a co-integrating relationship in the sesame supply response model. Sesame farmers’ response to producer prices is statistically significant and positive. Furthermore, area cultivated, and quantities of seed were found to significantly affect sesame output. The long-run and short run price elasticities were 0.084 and 0.029, respectively. The outcome of the study showed that, Nigeria may possibly improve its sesame output supply by increasing land area under cultivation and improvement in the quantity of seed supplied to help enhance output.
