The aim of this paper is to determine the influence of the Common Agricultural Policy’s (CAP) subsidies on the level of economic sustainability of farms by means of three-fold study. To determine the economic sustainability of farms the authors applied the income gap ratio. Next, the level of income differentiation between farms of various economic classes was established. The last part consisted of the recognition of statistically significant CAP schemes that shape agricultural income in farms of different size and in assessing how the respective subsidies should increase or decrease to fill the recognized gap, based on the coefficients of panel regression. The spatial scope covered all EU countries in 2005–2015. Results show that due to the CAP’s support the average income of farms has approached the average non-agricultural income, but distribution of this support favored the largest farms, increasing disparities within the sector.

Sustainable development plays an important role in shaping conditions for economic growth, social development and care for the natural environment. The issue was also noticed at the level of the European Union, which is expressed among others by creating sectoral policies, including the Common Agricultural Policy. The aim of the article is to determine the influence of the Common Agricultural Policy on the level of socio-economic sustainability of farms in Poland. The authors formulate a hypothesis that the existing solutions serve the achievement of economic sustainability, determined by the agricultural to non-agricultural income ratio, but they do not provide sustainability of farms in terms of the social element understood as taking income disparities into consideration. In the article, panel regression and the ratio of income from representative FADN farms to average annual gross salary per employee in Poland in the years 2004–2017 were used. It was found that thanks to the support from the Common Agricultural Policy, the average income of farms comes close to the average income of the non-agricultural sector. However, the influence of the subsidies on changes in economic sustainability was uneven in various economic size classes of farms—the strongest farms benefited the most, which means that social sustainability in terms of equal distribution of income was not achieved.

This paper aims to explore the importance of the direct-payments scheme as a tool for supporting the sustainable development of agriculture in Poland, and to assess the effects of the 2015 Common Agricultural Policy reform in this context. In particular, the study attempts to investigate the impact of different fund-allocation criteria on the regional distribution of direct payments. The research employs a simulation method in the form of variant analysis (the “what if” model)—a mathematical method with elements of statistical description, based on the complete dataset. For the purposes of one of the variants, a multi-criteria composite indicator was constructed, including stimulants and destimulants of the level of environmental sustainability of agricultural plant production. The analysis was conducted at the NUTS 2 level (voivodeships). The timeframe of the study covered the period 2010–2019. The data published by Statistics Poland and the Agency for the Restructuring and Modernisation of Agriculture were used as the source material. The analysis indicated that the 2015 Common Agricultural Policy reform redistributed public funds away from sustainable agricultural management principles. Applying some basic sustainability criteria in order to internalise environmental externalities would lead to a radical redistribution of first-pillar Common Agricultural Policy payments. The paper concludes that a real greening of the European Union’s agricultural policy is a task still to be accomplished.

One of the issues determining the economic situation of farms is the scope of their market integration. It can be therefore assumed that higher market integration leads to an improvement in the economic performance of households. The article has two aims. The first is to indicate the relationship between the degree of market integration of small-scale family farms and their economic condition. The second objective is to discover the determinants of the market integration of farms. The explanatory variables include economic (production value, total farm area, labour input, specialization of production) and demographic (farmer age, education level) factors. The novelty of our paper lies in in depth comparative analysis based on primary data from questionnaire surveys taken in 2018 and 2019 in five countries of Central and Eastern Europe: Serbia, Moldova, Lithuania Romania, and Poland. The results indicate is the existence of a statistically significant positive correlation between the degree of market integration and economic performance. Factors that favorably influence the level of market connection include the scale of production, specialization and, to some extent, level of farmowner’s education. The remaining variables are inconclusive or not statistically significant.

Economic sustainability plays an important role in shaping conditions for economic growth and social development. The importance of answering the question about the level of sustainability of family farms results from the fact that the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, apart from exceptions (e.g., the Czech Republic and Slovakia), are characterized by a fragmented agrarian structure. Hence, the main goal of this article was to answer two questions: (1) whether the countries of Central and Eastern Europe differ in the level of economic sustainability of small family farms; and (2) whether the same socioeconomic factors impact similarly on the level of economic sustainability of small family farms from countries of Central and Eastern Europe. The study was based on surveys conducted in small family farms: in 2018 from Poland (672 farms) and in 2019 in four other countries (Lithuania; 999 farms, Romania; 834 farms, Serbia; 523 farms, Moldova; 530 farms). The publication includes a critical analysis of the literature, structure analysis and correlation analysis. The results show the occurrence of large differences between the economic sustainability of small family farms from the countries of Central and Eastern Europe. The research indicates that the larger the area of a small-scale family farm, the greater its economic sustainability. The productivity of these farms increases with their economic sustainability. The results also prove a negative relationship between the age of the farmer and the economic sustainability of their farm in all analysed countries. These trends were found in all analysed countries of Central and Eastern Europe. The results of the analyses support the conclusion that agricultural policy instruments aimed at increasing the economic sustainability of small family farms should lead to: land consolidation, a decrease in the age of farm owners through generational changes, and a decrease in employment in agriculture, which would lead to a reduction in labour input in the agricultural sector.

Many authors emphasize that reducing the income deprivation of the agricultural sector in relation to the non-agricultural sectors is a prerequisite to the growth of sustainability of agriculture. Thus, this raises the question: despite the impact of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) on the value of agricultural income in EU countries, is there still income deprivation for agriculture in relation to non-agricultural sectors? If so, is its depth comparable among farms with a different scale of production from the same EU country or among farms with the same scale of production from different countries? The answers to these questions constitute the added value of the article. The aim of the paper is to compare the ratio of agricultural income to non-agricultural income in regard to family farms in EU countries. Results show that the CAP solutions do limit the agricultural income disparities but that there are significant differences in the income deprivation of farms with different production values in the same country. These differences also apply to farms with a similar production volume in different countries. This publication includes critical analysis of literature, spatial-analysis and panel regression. The time scale of the research is 2004–2017, the spatial scope is individual EU countries and the subjective scope is representative EU Farm Accountancy Data Network (FADN) farms.