Identification of public objectives related to agricultural sector support

The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) is a widely debated policy in terms of both its budget and its instruments. In order to serve the citizens of Europe properly, CAP requires optimal identification of the public objectives desired. This paper aims to analyse the relative weights that citizens assign to the various potential objectives of the CAP and to show how these can be used to improve the selection of policy instruments. As a means of identifying social preferences we used the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) technique on a population sample in Castilla y Leon (Spain). Results show how the current policy decision process lacks mechanisms capable of identifying social preferences and thus leading to the choice of sub-optimal policies. (C) 2004 Society for Policy Modeling. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.