CAP-IRE - Assessing the multiple Impacts of the Common Agricultural Policies (CAP) on Rural Economies

European rural areas are undergoing major changes, including the impacts of migration, changes in settlement patterns, demographic ageing, changes in the nature of rural-urban interactions, a decreasing role of agriculture in terms of income and employment and changes in governance systems. The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) is the main expenditure chapter of the EU and is directly affecting the economy of rural areas. Assessing the impact of the CAP will help in re-addressing the CAP in the wider framework of EU policy objectives. The objective of the project CAP-IRE is to develop concepts and tools to support future CAP design, based on an improved understanding of long-term socio-economic mechanisms of change in rural areas. Having assessed current and expected dynamics in rural areas, concepts and tools will be developed, shaped by state-of-the-art literature and a wide empirical testing. Coverage includes 11 case study regions in 9 countries of the EU. The focus will be on the interface between CAP and other factors of the rural economy, adopting farm households as the reference agents in the connection between policy and socio-economic change, as well as between agriculture and other sectors of the economy. Account of the wider non-EU and non-rural scenarios will be taken. The reaction of farm households to CAP reforms will be analysed under the lens of six thematic plus one cross-thematic issues, identified as follow: A) farm structural adjustment, investment and innovation; B) chain interactions between agriculture and related economic sectors; C) environmental sustainability; D) social sustainability; E) interactions between rural communities and the rest of the world; F) governance issues; G) the interplay of the previous aspects on a spatial basis. The first step of the project will be to devise concepts and tools able to fill the gaps in the present knowledge on development in rural areas. In the second step, these concepts and tools will be applied in an empirical analysis of mechanisms of change in selected case study areas, in order to understand baseline trends. In a third step, tools will be used to assess the impact of CAP in the selected areas. Expected progress compared to the state of the art concerns four main aspects: a) an improved conceptual view of CAP relationships in the context of changing rural areas and a framework to assess reciprocal impacts between CAP and other drivers of change in a long term perspective; b) an assessment of present and expected dynamics of change in rural areas; c) an assessment of the impacts of CAP on the present and future dynamics of change in rural areas; d) models and tools to assess changes in rural areas, with particular attention to the connection between CAP and other drivers