Date of Award
2008
Document Type
Thesis
First Advisor
Dr. Gabriel Asaftei
Abstract
In 2004 10 new countries, primarily Eastern European countries, joined the European Union (EU) with much media speculation concerning how this would affect their economies. This paper will look at how the Common Agricultural Program (CAP) affects agricultural productivity by measuring four independent variables and by using the 2004 entry as a natural experiment. The paper will estimate how the CAP affects the average farm size, fallow land area, proportion of farming dedicated to organic farming, and GOP growth. This is expected to impact agricultural productivity through increasing returns to scale, input availability, efficiency of land use and the Environmental Kuznets Curve respectively. The findings indicate an overall increase in agricultural productivity as a result of joining the EU from higher average farm size, lower levels of fallow land and higher proportions of organic farming. The estimation technique used was an ordinary least squares regression with fixed effects for each country.
Recommended Citation
Rhode, Flemming Schneider, "The impact of the common agricultural policy on agricultural productivity" (2008). Honors Theses. 369.
https://scholarship.richmond.edu/honors-theses/369