Article Sidebar
Published:
Jun 4, 1999Keywords:
Article Details
The copyright of a submitted article is only transferred to the publishers if and when the article is accepted for publication. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, electrostatic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior written permission of the publishers.
Main Article Content
Practical Implications of some Theoretical Assumptions in Performance Analysis: The Maize Market in Ghana
Abstract
Food markets serve as important indicators of the state of an economy due to their ability to direct resource allocation through the pricing mechanism. Prices alone however fail to reflect the proper signals if the process of price formation and the resulting market prices are assumed to be complete indicators of current and future market conditions without the cognizance of the specific environmental constraints and opportunities that characterize the marketing system. The correlation co-efficient of market prices or its contemporary modifications remains one of the most popular methods of assessing market performance. However, such tools can yield misleading results if applied across spatial markets with a non-homogenous harvesting period or market infrastructure, but a common trading market. In analyzing the performance of the maize market in Ghana from a heuristic standpoint, the paper attempts to highlight some pitfalls which might be obscured when the correlation co-efficient, as a measure of market performance, is interpreted without due consideration of the peculiarities of the marketing system involved.
