Using Experiments to Design and Evaluate the CAP: Insights from an Expert Panel

Over the last twenty years the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) has considerably evolved, by introducing new objectives and instruments to address the increasing number of challenges ahead. These changes call for the use of innovative tools to analyse agricultural policy design and evaluation. During the last European Association of Agricultural Economics conference, a panel of experts presented their points of view on how experiments can enhance the CAP evaluation toolkit. In this article we summarise the main insights emerging during this session. We present a review of the different existing experimental approaches followed by some examples of their application in the study of the CAP and a discussion of the potential hurdles to the use of experimental results to design actual policies. From the different contributions it emerges that experimental approaches may represent effective tools to improve the design and evaluation of the CAP. However, a potential hurdle to their wider use is that experimental results often fail to be confirmed when applied to large-scale policy interventions. In this article we discuss some potential solutions to the main problems affecting the scalability of experimental results, and we provide some insights on how experiments can help to improve the CAP further.