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Abstract
Average incomes in the agricultural sector are still much lower than average wages in non-agricultural sectors in the most of the EU Member States, which is contrary to one of the CAP’s initial objectives of “ensuring a fair standard of living for the agricultural community”. The main aim of this paper is to verify whether EU membership and the use of CAP funds helped reduce relative income gap of farmers. The second aim is to analyse which factors influence this income gap and how. Our study is based on EAA data for EU-27 for the period 1995–2015 and makes use of three panel data regression models estimated for all EU Member States, the “old” ones (EU-15) and the “new” ones (EU-12). Our results show that the social goals of the CAP support have not been achieved in the EU-15; however, they have been achieved under the SAPS in the EU-12.