Time series analysis of agricultural exports of Uganda from 1990 to 2020

Abstract

This study was to investigate the general trend and forecast of the total agricultural export of Uganda from 1990 to 2020, this is was due to agriculture being the sector where most Ugandan were engaged but yet poverty and unemployment numbers are still high. To do this we had to construct an autoregressive model of a suitable order for the process. The test statistics used in this research were autocorrelation function, autoregressive model and partial autocorrelation function. It was also discovered that among the test statistic used in this research, the forecast for the series was best obtained using the autoregressive of order one AR (1) and the MA (0). The goal of this study was to develop a methodology for the investigation of the trend and to forecast the fish exports using an ARIMA (autoregressive integrated moving average) model. A final model, based on the coffee export, was constructed from a number of tentative models identified by examining the ACF (autocorrelation function) plots and the PACF (partial autocorrelation function) plots. The study found out that from the trend that agriculture export was low in terms of monetary earning to the country and this could have due to the subsistence nature of the sector but with new government initiatives the sector picked up thus the upward trend. This underpins the development of a time series model for forecasting agriculture exports of Uganda. Several time series models including AR, MA, ARMA, ARIMA and SARIMA were fitted to the data, and it emerged that the most adequate model for the data was ARIMA (1, 2, 0). There will be increase in the receipts from agriculture export in the next ten years The Agricultural sector in Uganda employs more people and with the government initiatives to grow the economy it has looked at industrialisation where the sector under study in this research has both forward and backward linkages thus more efforts should be put in the modernization and machination of agriculture to see tremendous growth in the country as more will be exported due to more surplus in the country and more value addition forming the desired industries The government needs to develop a regulation policy on land reforms because Uganda is faced with problem of land fragmentation. This will help minimise or prevent the situation of exchanging fertile lands for unproductive activities or real estate development. The government is not to step in and control how individuals and community leaders should use their lands but provide a direction in which the above parties must act.