Winners and Losers of the CAP’s Rural Development Policy in Poland

The purpose of this study was to identify territorial clusters of Polish municipalities whose rural residents demonstrated higher or lower interest in the four programs of the CAP’s rural development policy compared to the country’s average interest. The clusters were identified on an aggregate basis and described with synthetic indexes of agriculture and rural development. The Moran’s global spatial autocorrelation coefficient was used to check for spatial autocorrelation. The results demonstrated that the support offered under the rural development programs covered by this analysis was higher in the regions with well-developed agricultural structures, while the areas with structural defects and the areas in need of development had lower-than-average levels of applications for all programs (regardless of their objectives). These findings call for a clear strategy to change the unfavorable structures in Polish agriculture. Otherwise, the regional development gaps in Polish agriculture will only deepen under these programs.