The co-evolution of policy support and farmers behaviour. An investigation on Italian agriculture over the 2008-2019 period

Abstract

This paper investigates the co-evolution of the CAP expenditure and of the farms’ performance and choices to assess whether and to what extent CAP assessment itself meets the requisites of Causal Inference. In order to identify some regularities in this co-evolution, the analysis is performed on a constant group of professional farms over a long enough time period. The Italian 2008-2019 FADN balanced sample is here considered. Results points to two major empirical implications. First of all, they question whether CAP expenditure is actually accompanied by any significant farmers’ response. An exception may actually concern the support specifically focused on environmental standards. Secondly, they raises some major methodological issues about the applicability of the Treatment Effect logic to CAP assessment.