Research

Administrative food-price series inform early warning, social-protection design, inflation surveillance, and the allocation of scarce public resources. Their value depends on disciplined interpretation. This paper establishes a source-audited economic baseline for the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) Selected Food Price Watch. It documents reported food-price dispersion and conditional relative-price persistence across Nigeria’s states and the Federal Capital Territory (FCT). We reconstruct a fixed-vintage panel of 43 source-labelled food items, 37 jurisdictions, and January 2017–April 2019. The source contains 44,548 state/FCT–item–month records, of which 44,547 are finite and positive. Median item-level cross-jurisdiction log-price dispersion is non-monotonic, ranging from 0.134 in April 2017 to 0.186 in March 2018. In a state-item fixed-effect model of 42,955 consecutive observations, the conditional one-month persistence coefficient is 0.696 (two-way-clustered 95% confidence interval: 0.655–0.737). On a matched 26-outcome-month window, an equal-length split-panel point diagnostic is 0.858, showing that finite-time dynamic-panel treatment materially affects the exact magnitude. The paper establishes two empirical facts about this administrative series. Reported prices are geographically heterogeneous and short-run relative-price deviations are persistent. This reproducible baseline gives policy users and subsequent empirical work a verified account of the series before it is used to interpret deeper market processes.

Post harvest work is part of the operational chain through which crops are stored, processed, transported, sold, or consumed. Its organisation can involve household members, paid workers, and outside-household unpaid workers. Accessibility may be relevant to these arrangements, but household distance, community market presence, travel time, and travel cost are distinct observed conditions. This paper provides a nationally structured, measurement-aware descriptive analysis of reported Post harvest labour organisation among Nigerian farm households. It uses 6,332 eligible household-crop records from 2,761 households in Wave 4 of the Nigeria General Household Survey Panel. The primary exposure is a household geovariable labelled distance in kilometres to the nearest market. It is analysed alongside linked community reports of market conditions. In national models, greater log market distance has a negative point association with paid hired-labour participation. After rurality, crop group, and state indicators are represented, the within-state conditional association is imprecise and changes sign. Recorded worker-hours have no precisely estimated distance gradient in either national or within-state specifications. The linked community indicators have modest correspondence with the household geovariable and are retained as supplementary measures rather than substitutes. The evidence does not identify a causal effect or the mechanisms behind coefficient changes. It establishes that in these household-crop records, conclusions about Post harvest labour organisation depend on the labour outcome, the accessibility measure, and the geographic comparison represented in the model. This provides a transparent descriptive baseline for agricultural and food-systems research connecting rural logistics with labour arrangements.