Political Rents of European Farmers in the Sustainable Development Paradigm. International, national and regional perspective

This book has been prepared by a team of researchers from six renowned academic centres in the field of agricultural economics in Poland, under a National Science Centre research grant titled “Political rents in the European Union’s agriculture – comparative analysis basing on the UE27”. It aims not only to extend the paradigm of sustainable development and the concept of political rent, but also to present the results of empirical studies carried out using data from 27 EU member states for the years 1995-2014 (some of the analyses also go back to the 1950s) together with Polish case studies. Viewing the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy from the standpoint of the theory of rent seeking is a relatively uncommon approach, particularly as the authors draw attention to the need to predefine the concept of political rent received by farmers in a situation where they are supplying public goods. The book can thus be said to some extent to fill a gap in existing research at the boundary between agricultural and political economy. The approach proposed by the authors may be all the more interesting since it presents issues of agricultural policy and political rents in agriculture from the point of view of a new EU member country, while the existing literature on the topic is dominated by analyses carried out by researchers from the old EU-15 members.The book is divided into four parts, forming a logical sequence. The research goal is to develop the theory of rent seeking and adapt it to the paradigm of sustainable agriculture and, more broadly, to that of sustainable development in general. The deliberations of the authors of the individual chapters, taken as a whole, serve to verify several research hypotheses: 1) the conceptual approach to political rents in agriculture is incomplete, because it does not take account of the process of creation of public goods in agriculture and the need to apply correction to the market in that sector;2) political rents in sustainable agriculture fulfil a new role, which goes beyond the rent-seeking concept; 3) despite the existence of a Common Agricultural Policy, the political rents received by EU farmers are highly differentiated at national and regional level – there exist national models of rent seeking;4) the European Agricultural Model is not a universal development model for EU agriculture given the existing large disproportions in rent seeking between countries.