The EU's Common Agricultural Policy: a case of defensive policy import

Abstract

The shift to direct payments, financed by large EU budgetary transfers, highlights the redistributive character of the CAP (Daugbjerg and Swinbank 2009). Today, the EU spends a considerable amount of resources on farm policy, total CAP spending (including newer rural development concerns) representing slightly less than 45 per cent of the EU budget. While this has decreased (from 70 per cent in 19804), it still makes the CAP, with its emphasis on redistribution, an anomaly in a EU so dominated by the regulatory logic of intervention that it has been dubbed a �regulatory state� (Majone 1994).