Predicting the Food Gap of White Sugar in Iraq using (Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average) (ARIMA) Models

Abstract

The prediction process it considered one of the important responsibilities of the decision makers in any institution as they conduct the prediction with the future demand based on the available historical data related to the phenomenon in question. One of the techniques of the economic prediction and the most prominent of them is the Auto regression and the Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA). This research aims at investigating the future predictions of the white sugar in Iraq for the period (2023-2037) by relying on the ARIMA model. The results showed the continuity of the gap of the sugar that will occur in the future to reach (611) thousand metric tons in (2037) and this entails finding certain ways to decrease this gap. The time series for the period (1990-2022) for the production and consumption of sugar it used to analyze the quantity of sugar consumed on the level of Iraq. The results of the quantitative analysis showed that the average growth in the quantity consumed is more than the quantity of sugar consumed and this indicates that there is a food gap for this material, due to the increase of the growth in population, the increase in the people’s income and the change in their daily consumption. The average annual consumption and the average annual production were (7.06) (0.12) respectively, with an average annual growth of the food gap which was (2.390) to the positive direction for the same period.