Impact of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) on the Development of Rural Territories: Principal Component Analysis in SW Spain, Extremadura (2007–2020)

Francisco Manuel Martínez García (), Gema Cárdenas Alonso and Ana Nieto Masot
Additional contact information
Francisco Manuel Martínez García: Department of Art and Territorial Sciences, University of Extremadura, 10003 Cáceres, Spain
Gema Cárdenas Alonso: Department of Art and Territorial Sciences, University of Extremadura, 10003 Cáceres, Spain
Ana Nieto Masot: Department of Art and Territorial Sciences, University of Extremadura, 10003 Cáceres, Spain

Agriculture, 2024, vol. 14, issue 9, 1-19

Abstract: The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) is a European Union (EU) policy aimed at supporting farmers, guaranteeing food security, and promoting sustainable rural development, which has undergone numerous reforms to adapt to the needs of the agricultural sector and society in general. The main objective of this work is to statistically analyse CAP aid in southwest Spain, specifically in Extremadura, a region characterised by areas at risk of depopulation and deep rural areas, during the last two periods of European aid (2007–2013 and 2014–2020). In this study, by means of principal component analysis (PCA), agricultural, economic, and demographic variables were interrelated, together with geographic information systems (GIS), to evaluate their impact on the development of the regional agricultural sector. This methodology will help to identify areas with improvements in their territorial structures and can therefore serve as a basis for their application in other European territories. Through the analysis, we identified areas where the interrelation of the variables showed improvements in their demographic, social, and economic structures, with the municipalities of populations over 10,000 inhabitants in Extremadura being the ones that compose the territorial substructure A. Therefore, this work shows how European agricultural aid can disproportionately favour the most dynamic territories and leave the less developed regions at a disadvantage.

Keywords: Extremadura; rural areas; principal component analysis (PCA); geographic information systems (GIS); territorial substructure (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q1 Q10 Q11 Q12 Q13 Q14 Q15 Q16 Q17 Q18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2077-0472/14/9/1497/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2077-0472/14/9/1497/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jagris:v:14:y:2024:i:9:p:1497-:d:1469230

Access Statistics for this article

Agriculture is currently edited by Ms. Leda Xuan

More articles in Agriculture from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().