Environmental taxes effect on environmental protection

Abstract

Finally, differences in public awareness, civic consciousness and fair treatment of nature determine, to a certain degree, individual responsibility of each country to nature under the “you have to pay for everything” approach. One of the main measures against global warming and rapidly increasing pollution are the environmental taxes. The research covers all countries of the European Union and world’s major economies: the U.S, Japan and China, as well as Norway and Turkey. The research involved application of the parallel methods for assessment of the regression tendencies of endogenous indicators, while the “weighted” index was used for summarization of the results. The following characteristics of the environmental condition were taken as the endogenous variables: greenhouse gas emissions, carbon dioxide emissions, and ecological footprint. The indicators of maintenance of the environmental condition were the following: physical consumption of renewable energy and its share in the total energy consumption. Research period: 1994-2015. Intensification of natural resource consumption, greenhouse gas emissions and renewable energy consumption were found to be reversely related to the growth of revenues from the environmental taxes. Comparison of the tax effect on the rate of economic growth and growth in energy consumption showed that the fiscal effect competed with the economic effect and did not compete at all with the energy effect, which was considerably stronger. The effect of environmental taxes was the strongest in the economically stronger countries with the highest ecological deficit. The role of these taxes was stronger in terms of maintenance of the level of natural energy resources at the expense of consumption of renewable energy. On the other hand, ecological taxation promotes development and introduction of pollution mitigation technologies and, consequently, creation of new jobs. This means that environmental taxes are directly related to ecological quality of people’s life.