Abstract

This paper aimed at modeling and forecasting wholesale prices of maize in Tanzania using Autoregressive Integrated Moving average model for data from February 2004 to August 2017 obtained from the Bank of Tanzania. Maize crop growers lack fundamental knowledge on which periods do prices of their harvests rise up. The empirical study found 𝐀𝐑𝐈𝐌𝐀 (𝟑,𝟏,𝟏) as the best model for maize wholesale price based on minimum Akaike`s Information Criterion (AIC) and the fitted model was found to be adequate using Ljung-Box test. The forecasted prices show an increase from September 2017 to January 2018 and then to June 2018 with the maximum price in June 2018 for the forecasted horizon. The forecasted prices decrease up to January 2019 and increase thereafter.