Common Agricultural Policy Beneficiaries: Evidence of Inequality from a New Data Set

Javier Garcia-Bernardo, Petr Janský and Vojtěch Mišák
Additional contact information
Javier Garcia-Bernardo: University of Amsterdam, Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences, Spui 21, 1012 WX Amsterdam, The Netherlands

No 2021/04, Working Papers IES from Charles University Prague, Faculty of Social Sciences, Institute of Economic Studies

Abstract: Although the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) is the largest expenditure programme of the European Union, not much is currently known either about its beneficiaries or about how unequally payments are distributed among them. We thus create a novel - and currently the most extensive - publicly available data set of CAP´s beneficiaries. We exploit a recent EU regulation which requires member states to disclose the identities and amounts allocated to all beneficiaries. We succeed in collecting data for 21 member states for up to 4 years between 2015 and 2018. We find that the extent of payment inequality among CAP beneficiaries differs among member states and that old member states generally tend to exhibit lower inequality while new member states tend to suffer from higher inequality. Specifically, Gini coefficients are lowest in Belgium, Finland, France and Denmark and highest in Slovakia, Estonia, Bulgaria and Czechia. In an additional exploratory analysis, we combine the amassed data with a company ownership database, which enables us to identify owners that are either foreign or common for multiple beneficiaries.

Keywords: Common Agricultural Policy; Common Agricultural Policy beneficiary; inequality; agriculture; European Union (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D63 H25 L11 Q14 Q18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 41 pages
Date: 2021-02, Revised 2021-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr and nep-eur
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://ies.fsv.cuni.cz/en/veda-vyzkum/working-papers/6392 (application/pdf)

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:fau:wpaper:wp2021_04

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers IES from Charles University Prague, Faculty of Social Sciences, Institute of Economic Studies Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Natalie Svarcova ().