STRUCTURAL BREAK IN RICE PRODUCTION : A STUDY WITH ASIAN COUNTRIES

As rice is the most important staple diet in Asia because of its high concentration of production and consumption in the region it is key to global food security. In this backdrop, understanding the stable growth of rice production through structural break analysis is quite important. This study attempts to investigate the presence of structural change in annual rice production for the major ten Asian rice producing countries for the period 1961 to 2016 following the Bai-Perron multiple breakpoint test and found significant changes after Asian Green revolution in level values but no break in growth. This study also found a sharp rise in intercept following intervention analysis and mixed results using linear trend analysis. Countries like China and India exhibited positive impact following structural change but the countries like Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam experienced negative effect which might be associated with major institutional and/or technological changes of these countries involved including the rice crisis of2008.