Ewa Rabinowicz analyses the impacts of the Rural Development Programme for Sweden in a report for the Expert Group for Public Economics. The total cost of the programme is 36 billion SEK. The analysis shows that the programme has small or undetectable effects. Several possible improvements of the programme are presented in the report:

• Reallocate resources from broad measures to targeted interventions with proven environmental benefits.
• Avoid support of equity reasons if the environmental benefit is low.
• Invest more resources in order to reduce eutrophication.
• Develop new measures at the landscape level, i.e. measures that target larger rural areas.
• Use resources in all rural industries, not just in agriculture.
• Conduct independent evaluations of the effectiveness of the rural programme.

The report is in Swedish with an English summary.