Analysis of the influence of environmental taxation on environmental innovations

Abstract

In modern conditions, human society is faced with numerous environmental problems, which call for necessary action in order to ensure sustainable development. In other words, solutions to environmental problems are urgently needed if we wish for future generations to have the same quantity and quality of resources that the current generations possess. Countries around the world, and especially EU member states, place a strong focus on environmental issues, and as one of the basic instruments in resolving them, they use environmental taxes. These taxes are intended to make polluters lower their pollution levels in order to reduce their tax burden. Among other things, they encourage polluters to invest in ecological innovations, all with the aim of reducing the tax burden and increasing the quality of the environment in the future. The aim of this paper is to establish how strong the influence of environmental taxation is on the development of ecological innovations. For this reason, correlation and regression analysis were used on a sample of EU member states. The obtained results show that the influence of these phenomena, i.e., variables, is positive and strong and that with the growth of income from environmental taxes per capita by 1%, the index of ecological innovations increases by 0.663 with a significance level of p=0.000.