ENVIRONMENTAL TAX REFORMS IN EUROPEAN COUNTRIES AND AN EVALUATION OF TURKISH CASE

Environmental taxes are one of the main operational tools of public finance for internalizing negative externalities. Since the beginning of the early 1980s price-based tools have been used to solve environmental problems. At the beginning of 1990s Scandinavian countries established some environmental tax reforms (ETR) and shifted the tax burden from earned income and capital to environmental pollution sources that they created. Likewise, some other EU countries, such as Holland, England and Germany implemented similar tax reforms. Nowadays many of the OECD countries have revised their tax laws according to pollution pay principles and shifted tax burden from good economic activities to emissions. Turkey has not managed to accomplish ETR yet; nevertheless, there are some arrangements that are expected to serve for this purpose in the tax laws.