Fiscal impacts of environmental tax reform in selected EU member states

Abstract

The purpose of the article is to analyse if – according to environmental tax reform assumptions – there occurs an increase in environmental taxes and a concurrent reduction of other taxes (especially personal and corporate income taxes) in the selected EU member states. The group of countries was chosen basing on more significant changes in the tax structure as well as “old” and
“new” EU membership. The research is based on the European Commission data and covers the period 2003 to 2015 due to the data availability. The significance of changes in taxation structure has been analysed by means of structural change degree measure. The direction of these changes has been examined using structural changes monotonicity measure. A weak trend to shift slightly from income taxes to the environmental ones has been observed only in three out of ten analysed member states.