A. Selection of Crop and Period Rice is selected for this study given their overwhelming place and importance in Bangladesh. Practically, all crop sector development strategy and investments so far, predominantly surrounded in rice. Some rice seasons are directly competitive with each other to scarce productive resources and therefore, any policy strategy for one is directly linked to the growth and development of the other. The present study covers the time period of 30 years, the latest data available from 1981-82 to 2010-11 which may be an advancement in terms of information analysis. This entire time period is chosen due to initial start of privatization as well as the rest of the time period to capture the effects of an emerging market enterprise economy. In accordance with the objectives 1 and 2, the entire data series was divided into three sub-periods viz. period I, period II and period III. The sub-periods were as follows: 1. Sub-Period I: 1981-82 to 1990-91 (10 years) 2. Sub-Period II: 1991-92 to 2000-01 (10 years) 3. Sub-Period III: 2001-02 to 2010-11 (10 years).
B. Selection of Price In accordance with the selection of rice crop, appropriate price was chosen. Price has an influence on resources allocation and is more important for policy purposes. In fact, farmers take area allocation decisions with respect to the expected prices prevailing during the post harvest period. In the present study harvest price of rice of three seasons has been used for analysis. Harvest price has been taken into consideration for the reason that wholesale and retail prices may not reflect what the farmers actually receive, because they are set at a considerably higher level than what the farmers get. Moreover, in the case of Bangladesh, farmers sell large portion of their products at immediate post-harvest period prices. So, harvest price is the most relevant price for the producer-farmers.
C. Nature and Sources of Data Times series data of annual harvest price, area, production, yield, agricultural credit disbursement, Boro irrigated area and price of competitive crops and rainfall of three seasons of rice have been used in the present study. The secondary data were collected from various publications of the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS).
D. Processing of Data The data were assembled and processed for further analysis. For disentangling inflationary price rise, price of rice crop were converted into real price by deflating by consumer price index (CPI). For the study period, CPI constitutes three base years for that reason, consumer price index (CPI) was converted into single base year (2005-06) by applying backward splicing. Harvest price of rice during current year was transformed into natural logarithm, one period lag of rice price has been used when regression were run for the current period.
E. Analytical Framework To fulfill the objectives of the study the following analytical framework have been used:
Growth rates in nominal and real price, production, area, and yield of rice crop are estimated for examining the growth performance of the rice crop sector. If the growth rate is not constant but depends on time the compound model cannot describe the actual picture of the growth scenario (Gujarati, 2003). Therefore, before performing growth analysis it was necessary to identify the growth model that best fits the time series data. To know the growth of area, production, yield and price of rice of three seasons in Bangladesh for the period of 1980-81 to 2010-11, the following Exponential model was used.