Tax Policy and Environmental Challenges in the European Union –Earlier Tendencies and Their Reflection Today

Nowadays, ecological taxes are considered one of the most attractive instruments of environmental policy. Their main idea is to change the price of natural resources in line with their scarcity, which corresponds to the fundamental principle of the market economy. Environmental taxes are means to correct, mitigate or eliminate diseconomies and other failings of the unregulated market. The motivation for their introduction is in fact the appropriate environmental resource management. It is assumed that the environmental tax in the amount of damage caused by particular economic activities would stimulate pollutants to include these damages in their production and consumption decisions.