A harmonized and spatially-explicit dataset for the European Union’s €61 billion in Common Agricultural Policy payments to farmers for 2015

The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) is the largest budget item in the European Union, but Member States report spending in a variety of formats and languages, hampering holistic analysis. Here we have made the payment data centered around the year 2015 spatially-explicit at the county or province (NUTS3) level, and aligned payment measures reported between Member States, by translating, harmonizing, and geolocating 16,443,532 million payments originally reported by EU Member States and compiled by the Open Data Foundation Germany through its project Farmsubsidy.org. We have assembled the first database to our knowledge to report individual farm-level CAP payments by standardized CAP funding measures and geolocation. This dataset allows in-depth analysis of over €60 billion in public spending from 2015 by purpose and location for the first time. Further, this data is representative of the distribution of annual payments dictated by the CAP program for 2014 to 2020. These data are of interest to researchers, policymakers, NGOs, and journalists alike for evaluating the distribution and impacts of CAP spending.