Sytuacja ekonomiczna gospodarstw domowych rolników w wybranych krajach Unii Europejskiej i Stanach Zjednoczonych

The aim of the study discussed in the article is to compare the changes in the economic situation of farmers’ households in selected EU countries to those in the USA. The main criterion for selecting the EU countries for the study was the date of their accession to the EU and their consequent joining the Common Agricultural Policy. France represents the founding countries of the EU, Austria entered the community in 1995, and Poland in 2004. The study analyses this latter year and the year 2018, mainly because of the accessible data. The USA, a country playing a significant role in the global economy whose agricultural policy is different than that of the EU, is used as a reference. The analysis was based on individual data for households of farmers obtained from the Luxembourg Income Study Database (LIS). The study employed the Dagum model, which is the theoretical model of income distributions used for describing empirical distributions, characterised by a high goodness of fit to the empirical data. Descriptive characteristics, measures of income inequality and poverty rates were determined in the course of the study. According to the results, the smallest income inequalities in the analysed periods occurred in Austria, while the largest were observed in the USA. In all the three studied European countries, i.e. Austria, France and Poland, the values of most poverty indicators grew. The USA is the country where the risk of poverty is most stable.