Which factors affect the distribution of direct payments among farmers in the EU Member States?

This paper analyses the distribution of direct payments (DPs) between farmers within the EU countries. The paper tries to identify some of the factors that can explain the differences between countries in terms of recent distribution and the evolution over time of the distribution of DPs, comparing results of different regression models. The analysis has confirmed that the concentration of direct payments is very heterogeneous across EU countries and that it reaches very high values in some of them. This is even truer when, as in this paper, non-beneficiary farms are accounted for in the analysis of the DP distribution. The results support the idea that a large part of the concentration of the DP support is generated by the way land is distributed among farms. The results do not support the hypothesis that the models of implementation of the Single Payment Scheme can explain the observed differences among member countries in terms of DP concentration.