MARKOV CHAIN ANALYSES OF PRODUCTION OUTPUTS OF SELECTED CEREALS IN GHANA

Abstract

The increasing demand for maize and rice in Ghana has attracted the attention of government and other stakeholders. For instance, the Government of Ghana’s Planting for Food and Jobs initiative aims to increase the outputs of maize and rice by some 30% and 49% respectively in order to make the country food secure. Although previous studies have researched on the production outputs of these cereals in Ghana, such studies have mostly been based on parametric methods. To improve understanding of the output trends for agricultural policy directives, this study modelled the annual production outputs of maize and rice in Ghana using the non-parametric (Markov chain process) approach. The annual production outputs of maize and rice from 1960 to 2018 sourced from index mundi were classified into three states (low, stable and high). The result showed that, at equilibrium both maize and rice have 50.4% and 63.2% chances respectively of being in a high state. It was found that it would take approximately 2 years for the production outputs of these cereals to return to high state after leaving it and the expected length the production output of maize and rice stays in the high state were approximately 2 years and 3 years respectively. Also, the average production output of maize and rice in the long-run were 837,786 metric tons and 126,027 metric tons respectively. Five years forecast of these cereals revealed that maize production will be increasing whiles rice production will exhibit a fluctuating pattern. The study concludes that the production of maize and rice in Ghana is characterised by high variability index, which implies that the production outputs of these cereals are largely unstable.