The European Union's Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) has not halted farmland biodiversity loss. The CAP post-2023 has a new ''Green Architec-This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
We replicate Bocquého et al. (2014), who used multiple price lists to investigate the risk preferences of 107 French farmers. We collected new data from 1430 participants in 11 European farming systems. In agreement with the original study, farmers' risk preferences are best described by Cumulative Prospect Theory.The views expressed are purely those of the authors and may not, in any circumstances, be regarded as stating an official position of the European Commission.
Summary
In order to keep pace with the evolution of the objectives and means of the EU's Common Agricultural Policy, evaluation tools also need to adapt. A set of tools that have proved highly effective in other policy fields is economic experiments. These allow the testing of a new policy before its implementation, provide evidence of its specific effects, and identify behavioural dimensions that can influence policy outcomes. We argue that agricultural policy should be subject to economic experiments, providing examples to illustrate how they can inform CAP design. We identify the additional efforts needed to establish further proof‐of‐concept, by running more – and more robust – experiments related to the CAP. This can happen only by integrating experimental evaluation results within the policy cycle and addressing ethical and practical challenges seriously. To do so, researchers would benefit from a concerted European effort to promote the methodology across the EU; organise the replication in time and across Europe of experiments relevant for the CAP; and build a multi‐national panel of farmers willing to participate in experiments. Steps are being taken in this direction by the Research Network of Economics Experiments for CAP evaluation (REECAP).
The proposed Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) for the period 2021–2027 will be more flexible and, presumably, more effective. To provide for sufficient ambition and prevent a race to the bottom, national strategic plans will be introduced with quantitative targets covering both policy pillars. This article argues that since formal requirements and the evaluation model are weak on actual long-term impact, substantial improvements are unlikely. To test this, programming rules are experimentally evaluated on the implementation of CAP 2014–2020 in Slovenia. The experiment shows that while measures and resources broadly correspond to policy objectives, the specific relevance of measures is generally weak and has potential effects dispersed among several objectives, resulting in high costs for individual objectives at best. Without the effective inclusion of an impact assessment, the outcome will rely on the capacity and benevolence of national governance systems.
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