Environmental taxes and subsidies
Environmental taxes
An environmental tax is a tax on something that has a proven, specific negative impact on the environment. The tax base can be a physical unit, for example litres of gasoline, or a proxy of a physical unit, for example taxes on nuclear power stations. The tax is always a monetary amount, such as euros.
Environmental tax statistics present data on taxes in the following areas:
- energy
- transport
- pollution
- resource
Disaggregated tax data are submitted by the reporting EU members to Eurostat. For further information, please consult the national tax list in the article Tax revenue statistics. These data are used to determine the level of revenue from these taxes.
Eurostat also collects and publishes data on these tax revenues broken down by economic activity for producer units, households and non-residents (tax payers).
The recording of these data is fully compatible with the concepts used in the system of national accounts.
Environmental subsidies
Environmental subsidies are payments by the government to corporations and households for environmental purposes, as defined in the system of environmental-economic accounting (SEEA). An example of an environmental subsidy is a government payment to promote the installation of solar panels on the roofs of buildings. Eurostat collects data on subsidies and current and capital transfers, according to the European system of accounts (ESA).
These transactions are classified by:
- the economic actors who receive the subsidy (recipients grouped by ‘institutional sector’ as set out in ESA) . Recipients can be corporations, households or a foreign economic unit (for example in case of foreign aid). Whenever the recipient of the subsidy is a corporation, they are also classified by economic activity according to the NACE Rev. 2 classification;
- by environmental purpose, as set out in the classification of environmental protection activities (CEPA 2000) and in the classification of resource management activities (CReMA). This allows estimates of subsidies for example for biodiversity or waste management.