| Abstract: | Commodity exchanges have crucial roles in the economic development of a nation at large and in the financial and non-financial developments of their market actors. Exporters of commodities as market actors of commodity exchanges are expected to benefit from agricultural commodity exchanges. The purpose of this paper was to examine the role of ECX to enhance agricultural commodity exports with the case of export sesame seed. A structured questionnaire was prepared to measure ECX’s role in this regard from its sesame seed exporting members’ perspective. A quantitative research approach was implemented, and the hypotheses were also tested on a sample of 215sesame seed exporting members and non-member direct traders of ECX. Out of the 215 distributed questionnaires, valid response was collected from 203 respondents resulting with a 94.42% percent response rate. The data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, correlation & regression. The findings of descriptive statistics of the independent variables showed that facilitation of physical commodity trade dimension scored the highest rating with a mean value of 3.83 while the remaining variables also scored mean value above 3.00 this shows that, functions of ECX were perceived to be satisfactory to the members. The correlation analysis result indicated that market information provision had significant correlation with the export performance with 95% confidence interval & at 0.05 p-values, by scoring a Pearson Correlation Coefficient “R value” of 0.515 and the remaining variables result indicated that they were moderately correlated with export performance. In addition to correlation analysis, further regression analysis was also conducted, and the result indicated that storage and grading, market information provision, enabling competition, price discovery and market development dimensions of ECX‟s roles had a significant positive influence on export performance of sesame seed exporters. |
