Common agricultural policy beneficiaries: evidence of inequality from a new data set

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.