The Commission’s draft rural development regulation in its CAP post-2013 package has attracted much less attention than the direct payments and single common market organisation regulations. But while the rural development regulation has given rise to fewer controversies, there will be changes in the ways rural development programmes are implemented and managed.
These changes were outlined and discussed in the presentation by Francesco Mantino (INEA, Italy) on the EU’s new rural development policy after 2013 given as part of the session on the state of the CAP reform negotiations at the annual conference of the Italian Association of Agricultural and Applied Economics in Parma.
Mantino’s presentation focuses on four elements:
• The main changes in the regulations concerning rural development (and cohesion) policies
• The state of the art in the trilogue negotiations
• The financial and institutional factors influencing the design of future rural development programmes
• Some preliminary discussion of policy strategies in some selected EU countries (France, Spain and Italy) and factors likely to influence success or failure.
I reproduce below three of his slides which describe the state of play in the trilogue negotiations on programming issues, criteria for targeting support and other specific issues, respectively.
Mantino concludes that every reform of rural development policy raises transactions costs of policy use (information, coordination and learning costs) but that there are some potential opportunities in the new regulation to reduce these transactions costs, for example, through more simplified payment rules and through allowing the reorganisation of delivery structures. His main concern is whether the national resources to co-finance policy measures will be sufficiently available in the current climate of austerity in all EU countries.
Update 16 June 2013: The full paper accompanying this presentation can be downloaded here.
