Agricultural systems in the European Union: an analysis of regional differences

The recognition of agricultural and territorial systems is essential to define regional development programs., and tThe analysis of their characteristics is particularly relevant in a period when the new Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) is going to be designed and planned.Present research tries to identify and analyse the main structural agricultural models within the European Union, whose classification could be useful to define policies and tools of intervention, in view of the new programming period (2014-2020). The research is focused on the analysis of agricultural features in 247 regional areas (NUTS 2) of all European countries; andit has been carried out adopting a Principal Components Analysis (PCA) to identifr the main factors that differentiate agricultural systems in EU countries, taking into account a specific 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 to better understand the characteristics of the European Union countryside and better orientate the planning of the new CAP.