Amhara Region Agricultural Research Institute, Bair Dar, Ethiopia.
International Centre for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA), Rabat, Morocco.
PLoS One. 2024 Sep 19;19(9):e0308651. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0308651. eCollection 2024.
We test the hypothesis whether levels of key traits of sheep heterogeneously affect market prices of sheep in a rural setting. Feasible generalized least squares and (un)conditional quantile regression estimations were made on a dataset of 1153 sheep transactions in two primary small ruminant markets in the Amhara region of Ethiopia. The empirical results show that animal traits affect the observed prices of sheep differently, but only partly explain the sheep price differences. Our results also reveal that in addition to animal traits, the type of buyers and seasonality of sheep marketing cause heterogeneity in the observed prices. These findings imply that targeting the animal traits demanded by the market and access to price information that enables farmers to respond to the seasonal changes in livestock markets are essential to increase the income of sheep keepers.
我们检验了这样一个假设，即在农村环境下，绵羊关键特征的水平是否会对绵羊的市场价格产生异质性影响。我们在埃塞俄比亚阿姆哈拉地区的两个主要小反刍动物市场上对 1153 笔绵羊交易数据进行了可行广义最小二乘法和（非）条件分位数回归估计。实证结果表明，动物特征对绵羊观察价格的影响不同，但只能部分解释绵羊价格差异。我们的结果还表明，除了动物特征外，买家类型和绵羊销售的季节性也导致了观察价格的异质性。这些发现意味着，针对市场所需的动物特征，并获得使农民能够对牲畜市场季节性变化做出反应的价格信息，对于提高绵羊饲养者的收入是至关重要的。
