The role of the Common Agricultural Policy in the spatial location of agricultural activities

The objective of this paper is to analyse and quantify the spatial dimension of the CAP effects in an area of Northern Italy. The analysis is based on survey information about stated intentions of farmhousehold in two CAP scenarios, treated through statistical analysis intended to identify the potential determinants of different farm reactions, focusing on explicit spatial variables (altitude, LFA, agrarian regions) among explanatory variables. Altogether, the study shows the relevance of explicitly addressing the spatial effects of policies and also the differentiated spatial effect of policy on different dimensions of agricultural activities. However, the work also highlights the limitation of the location-based representation of the spatial dimension compared with both non-spatial variables and more functional variables underlying the spatial dimension.