Digital Governance Interoperability and Agricultural Market Performance in Conflict-Affected Areas of the Lake Chad Basin

The study combines a seven-year longitudinal panel of 2,416 households with a continuous-treatment Difference-in-Differences framework exploiting within-corridor variation in institutional interoperability, measured by the Pragmatic Interoperability Quality Index (PIQI), a transparent equal-weighted composite of fifteen institutional indicators. Because PIQI varies only at the corridor-year level (28 corridor-year values across four corridors), estimates are interpreted as associations rather than definitive causal effects. Re-estimation using the supplied household panel and the documented baseline specification indicates that a 0.1-unit increase in PIQI is associated with a 1.45-percentage-point increase in producer price realisation and a 1.74-percentage-point increase in market participation, alongside a 2.05-percentage-point reduction in transaction failures and a 1.34-percentage-point reduction in post-harvest losses. These estimates are based on 7,324 household-year observations, household and year fixed effects, and four corridor clusters; inference relies on Webb six-point wild-cluster bootstrap percentile confidence intervals and should be treated cautiously given the small number of clusters.