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The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) is a European Union (EU) policy aimed at supporting farmers, guaranteeing food security, and promoting sustainable rural development, which has undergone numerous reforms to adapt to the needs of the agricultural sector and society in general. The main objective of this work is to statistically analyse CAP aid in southwest Spain, specifically in Extremadura, a region characterised by areas at risk of depopulation and deep rural areas, during the last two periods of European aid (2007–2013 and 2014–2020). In this study, by means of principal component analysis (PCA), agricultural, economic, and demographic variables were interrelated, together with geographic information systems (GIS), to evaluate their impact on the development of the regional agricultural sector. This methodology will help to identify areas with improvements in their territorial structures and can therefore serve as a basis for their application in other European territories. Through the analysis, we identified areas where the interrelation of the variables showed improvements in their demographic, social, and economic structures, with the municipalities of populations over 10,000 inhabitants in Extremadura being the ones that compose the territorial substructure A. Therefore, this work shows how European agricultural aid can disproportionately favour the most dynamic territories and leave the less developed regions at a disadvantage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) is a European policy created in the early 1960s to address the food and economic problems affecting European society and the agricultural sector in particular. Throughout its history, the various reforms carried out in this policy have oriented it towards a reduction of direct aid to farmers' production (due to its excessive cost, among other reasons), in favor of income-related aid. In recent years, the agricultural sector in Extremadura has received CAP aid in a very unequal manner, with a more significant concentration in the agricultural areas where intensive production has been established as a base and where there is a larger population. Thus, the main objective of this research is to analyze the spatial relationships between CAP subsidies and other demographic, economic and social context variables. To achieve the proposed objective, a spatial regression model, namely Geographically Weighted Regression (GWR), has been calculated to determine the relationship between the amounts received from the CAP and the socioeconomic situation of each of the municipalities in the region. The results show a concentration of this aid in the most dynamic areas, with municipalities with a larger population and a more productive agriculture, mainly related to irrigated farms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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For 25 years the rural development policy has been implemented through the LEADER Approach in the EU to reduce differences between rural and urban areas, as well as to satisfy the basic needs of the population. In this paper, Extremadura is analysed, which is a Spanish region where LEADER has been applied since its inception in 1991. The objective is to assess if the distribution of rural development aids has been influenced by the diverse demographic and socioeconomic realities that Extremadura presents from the analysis of variables that represent these realities on the territory through a GIS. Following this methodology, it has been noticed that the largest investments have been executed in the most developed rural areas of the region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]