The EU budget battle: Assessing the trade and welfare impacts of CAP budgetary reform

摘要

There is a paucity of quantitative impact assessments of the sectorial and macroeconomic impacts of CAP budget reform for EU member states. To fill this gap, the current study employs a sophisticated agricultural variant of the GTAP model to evaluate the recently agreed CAP spending limits for the financial period 2014-2020 as well as a more radical 50% cut to the CAP budget proposed by the UK government. The study incorporates methodological innovation in terms of the modelling of CAP budgetary mechanisms. Furthermore, official EU auditing statistics are employed to (i) greatly improve the existing representation of agricultural support payments in the GTAP benchmark data and (ii) implement a detailed contemporary CAP baseline for member states to capture both the decoupled/coupled split of support payments and the distribution of support across both 'pillars'.