The Costs of the Common Agricultural Policy

First published in 1982. Considerable public controversy surrounded the large amount of public expenditure devoted to agriculture under the European Community’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). There were serious disputes over how the farm support system operated and how it was financed.

This book describes the CAP situation and summarises previous attempts to assess some of the economic and financial flows arising from its creation using a common framework of well-established economic theory and methods. The CAP turned out to have a number of ‘costs’, depending on the concept of ‘cost’ used, the alternative policies considered, and the various assumptions made.

The bulk of the book presents the structure and results of a comprehensive model of European Community agricultural markets and the associated CAP support mechanisms. This model is validated against official Community budget figures and then run to simulate a number of policy options and their consequences. This title will be of interest to students of economics, geography and agriculture.