Agricultural History Review, Volume 46 Part 1 (1998), pp. 81–98

This article uses the Producer Subsidy Equivalent (PSE) method of measuring farm support as a basis for quantifying the subsidies provided in the UK as a whole and the region of Wales between 1947 and 1972. The results demonstrate that when expressed as a percentage of" the value of production, the PSE was on average higher in Wales than the UK as a whole. This was partly a product of the spatial dimension to UK farm policy provided in the form of hill farm subsidies. However, market price support dominated farm policy expenditure which, along with headage payments and improvement grants, tied the benefits of support to the scale of production. This penalized Wales where farm size was smaller on average than in the UK as a whole. Indeed, when the PSE results are expressed per hectare and per farm they show that hill farm subsidies were not sufficient to compensate for the disadvantage Welsh agriculture experienced from its smaller average farm size. 

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