Environmental taxes in the context of contemporary challenges

Abstract

For more than 50 years, issues of the environmental protection and pollution prevention have attracted an attention of the general public, scientists and governmental bodies. These concerns has especially increased due to the reduction in supplies and the increase in prices for natural gas and oil on a global scale, as well as the fact that the energy sector generates significant volumes of greenhouse gas emissions. With this in mind, environmental regulation is gaining more and more relevance. Environmental taxes are one of the tools for its implementation. The expansion of environmental taxes around the world took place in conditions of their active support by scientists, activists of the environmental protection movement, representatives of business and government agencies. However, if previously publications highlighted the positive side of these economic instruments of environmental regulation (incentives for polluters to reduce the level of environmental pollution, the formation of revenues for budgets that can be used to finance environmental and social programs), then in the last 3-5 years, there began to appear separate scientific publications, in which the effectiveness of environmental taxes as a mean of regulation the state of the environment is questioned. The objective of this paper is to define factors and features of the environmental taxes’ application that reduce their effectiveness as a tool for environmental regulation of the economy. As a result of the analysis of the environmental taxes’ revenues dynamics, peculiarities of their application in some countries of the world, and the dynamics of pollutants’ emissions, it was once again confirmed that environmental taxes alone cannot solve all environmental problems. They should be supplemented with other tools and approaches of environmental regulation. In addition, it is possible to increase the effectiveness of environmental taxes by removing those rebates, exemptions and subsidies from the national tax systems that have a negative impact on the environment and by indexing environmental taxes’ rates in accordance with inflation rates. Ideally, it is also advisable to harmonize environmental taxes’ rates on a global scale. But at the moment, this is unlikely to happen even in the medium run. Implementation of these recommendations in practice will allow not only to reduce the level of environmental pollution, but also to obtain additional funds for the carrying-out environmental protection and social programs, for example – in the field of energy conservation, which should reduce the dependence of countries on fuel imports.