Econometric Analysis of Characteristics Influencing Cattle Prices in Selected Livestock Markets in Yobe State, Nigeria

Abstract: A survey was conducted to analyze buyers' preference between Sokoto Gudali, White Fulani and Red Bororo in some selected livestock market in Yobe State.Three major cattle markets were purposively selected, based on high concentration of cattle, cattle marketers and major distributing point of the cattle in the state. Potiskum cattle market, Ngalda cattle market in Fika local Government and Ngalzarma cattle market in Fune Local Government were purposively selected for the study. Some 390 Buyers were selected from three markets on weekly basis for period of 26 weeks. Descriptive statistics, Ginni Co-efficient and multiple regressions were employed to analyze the collected data. The result of the study revealed that, 39.7% of cattle, buyers were within age group of 31-40years, 100% of the respondents were male and 96.7% were found to be married. The respondents (52.3%) were small buyers category, 24.9% medium and 22.8% were large-scale buyers. Greater percentage of the respondents (63.3%) preferred Red Bororo. The Ginni co-efficient model shows that the markets structure was competitive with low Ginni co-efficient of 0.4863. Hedonic regression generally showed that In all the three cattle market, Red bororo breed of cattle were compared with White Fulani and Sokoto gudali, the results shows that white fulani were found to be statistically significant at probability level of(P<0.05), in model I, II and IV with negative coefficient, and sokoto gudali were also found to be significant though negative in model I to IV, which implies that price of Red bororo were higher than that of two other breed,female cattle were found to be statistically significant (P<0.001) with negative coefficient, this implies that the price of male cattle were higher in all the cattle markets compared with female cattle. Big size cattle were found to be statistically significant (P<0.001) with positive coefficient,short horn cattle were found to be significant ( P<0.01) with positive coefficient in all the models. The height of cattle is another important physical characteristic that determine the size of cattle and height was found to be highly statistically significant (P<0.001) in all the models and positive coefficient, implies that cattle with height attracted more price which means for any unit increases in these variables buyers would be willing to pay premium. 1t was recommended that, research efforts should target the characteristics of these cattle that buyers are sensitive to, which will enhance profitability, production and marketing.