Government interventions in the agricultural sector have been historically justified by the existence of an income disparity between farmers and non‐farmers. However, recent studies have found that such disparity is disappearing over time, particularly in the United States. This work offers the first longitudinal systematic assessment on the average income disparity between farm and non‐farm units in the European Union, differentiating between old and new Member States. Using the EU‐SILC dataset, both broad (having some farm income) and narrow (living mainly on agriculture) farm households are compared with a general sample of non‐farm households and a more restricted sample of self‐employed non‐farm households. To control for household observable characteristics and time‐constant unobserved factors, we use a fixed effects regression. Results suggest that the farm/non‐farm income disparity has disappeared in the European Union unless we compare narrow farm households with all non‐farm households: in this case, the former are more likely to be better off than the latter. A limited income disparity is found only in the case of new Member States for broad farm households only. Results are used to draw policy implications regarding the role of CAP in supporting farm income.

中文翻译：

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欧盟农户与非农户之间的有条件收入差距：纵向分析

历史上，政府对农业部门的干预因农民与非农民之间存在收入差距而被证明是合理的。但是，最近的研究发现，这种差异随着时间的流逝而消失，尤其是在美国。这项工作首次对欧洲联盟农业部门和非农业部门之间的平均收入差异进行了纵向的系统评估，从而区分了新旧成员国。使用EU-SILC数据集，将广泛的农户（有一定的农业收入）和狭窄的农户（主要以农业为生）与非农户的一般样本和自雇型非农户的样本进行了比较严格的比较。为了控制家庭可观察的特征和时间恒定的未观察因素，我们使用固定效应回归。结果表明，除非我们将狭窄的农户与所有非农户进行比较，否则欧盟中的农业/非农收入差距已经消失了：在这种情况下，前者比后者的状况更好。仅在新会员国仅适用于广大农户的情况下，收入差距有限。结果用于得出关于CAP在支持农业收入中的作用的政策含义。