ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION EXPENDITURES IN THE EUROPEAN UNION: THE CASE OF THE VISEGRAD COUNTRIES

The aim of the paper is to evaluate environmental protection expenditures evolution in relationship to economic growth, carbon dioxide emissions, greenhouse gas emissions and environmental tax revenue in the Visegrad four (V4) countries, i.e. the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia in comparison with the European Union (EU) as a whole. The paper tries to find answer whether environmental protection expenditures are explained by mentioned variables, i.e. if rise or decrease in pollution affects environmental expenditures or if it is vice versa. Have green expenditures already reduced unfavourable emissions in these countries? Do countries generating more important environmental damages have higher environmental protection expenditures? Analysis is realised using the ARDL (autoregressive distributed lag) methodology. The ARDL can be applied also in the case of shorter time series. Environmental topics were not objects of high statistic interest in most of the EU countries before 2000. Consequently, sufficiently long time series are missing and it is not possible to apply standard methodology. However, the ARDL model helps us to avoid the problem and to obtain relevant results in this field. The paper was elaborated within the project VEGA 1/1195/12.