Recent trends in the distribution of farm sizes in the EU

Over the last decades, the number of farms has been decreasing and the average operated area has been increasing all over the European Union. This paper aims at studying the distribution of farm sizes across the 27 EU Member states both at the national and regional levels, and how it evolved from 2005 to 2013. Using two indicators of farm size, namely the median size of farms and the hectare-weighted median size of farms, along with two indicators of farm-size inequality, the Gini coefficient and the Herfindahl-Hirschman index, it shows that a variety of situations exists across Europe but that the overall tendency is that of a general increase in farm sizes which most often results in an increase in farm-size inequality and concentration