EU Agricultural Systems in the new CAP perspectives

In recent years EU agricultural system have been characterized by several development patterns and different policies tools have been adopted by each country as a means to reach economic development in rural regions, above all in advanced countries. The recognition of agricultural and territorial systems is essential to define regional development programs, especially in a period when the new rural development policies are going to be designed and planned. Present research tries to identify and analyse main structural models of “agricultures” within European Union, whose classification could be useful as decision tool to define policies of intervention, in view of new programming period (CAP 2014-2020). The research is focused on the analysis of agricultural features in 247 regional areas (NUTS 2) of all European countries and has been carried out adopting a Principal Components Analysis (PCA) to identify main factors that differentiate agricultural systems in EU countries, taking into account a specific group-set of social and economic indicators. Afterward, by applying cluster analysis on the results of PCA, we classified the different regional areas into homogenous groups. The results allow a general classification of “homogeneous agricultural areas”,, whose categorization may be useful for better understanding characteristics of the European Union countryside and better orientate ongoing planning of new CAP.