Aplinkosauginių mokesčių pajamų kitimo tendencijos Lietuvoje ir Europos Sąjungoje

Abstract

It is noted that more and more attention is paid to environmental taxes according to scientific researches, legislation and international political agreements. Resolutions of Rio +20 conference, the EU “Climate Change Package”, EU “Sustainable Development Strat egy” and other documents enable to create mutually beneficial and environmentally effective tax strategies. Many scientific researches focus on the significance of environmental taxes ant their trends in European countries, but there are no researches on t his topic in Lithuania so it is not clear how important are environmental taxes and how effectively they are functioning. The aim of this paper is to evaluate environmental taxation trends in Lithuania and EU. Hypothesis of this research – environmental p rotection mechanism in Lithuania works quite ineffectively and the funds collected from environmental taxes are not used properly. Therefore, there is a pressing need to improve the tax system in accordance with the “polluter pays” principle also to sugges t the guidelines for environmental taxation system improvement that the polluting subjects should pay higher taxes also the funds collected from environmental taxes should be used more effectively so therefore the environmental protection would be improved. This study evaluates the effectiveness of environmental taxes in Lithuania also the relationship between those taxes and environmental indicators as well the trends of taxes. The data obtained by this research is compared with indicators of those EU coun tries who have implemented environmental tax reform.