Navigating the indicator jungle : a roadmap to analyze common agricultural policy indicators

The CAP monitoring framework includes a wide range of policy indicators, covering output, results, context, and impact. In environmental policy sciences, the complexities of analysing policy instruments and indicators are well known and techniques like statistical pattern analysis and grouping indicators into "umbrella" or composite indicators are recommended to simplify analysis. These methods are less common in agricultural economics and political sciences. This working paper investigates methods for constructing umbrella indicators and presents a literature-based roadmap for their application to the CAP indicators. It demonstrates that these methods can be successfully applied not only in other scientific fields but also to CAP indicators.