State and prospects of environmental taxes application in Ukraine

Pollution of the environment, especially by industrial enterprises, remains the pressing problem in the global scale. This situation leads to a more extended use of instruments of the environmental regulation in general and environmental taxes in particular. In Ukraine inefficient use of natural resources partly provoked by the attitude towards them as to "free of charge", that can be still observed in the society, caused catastrophic consequences in some parts of the country. The implementation of the Tax Code of Ukraine brought about a significant raise of the environmental tax rates. But the question of whether this measure of government was enough for the reduction of the environmental pollution still remains. To solve this question and taking into account pursuits of the government of Ukraine to integrate in international organisations and unions (European Union in particular) the comparison was made with the level of environmental taxes revenues and environmental taxes rates in European Union, some of the OECD member countries and Ukraine. The results of the conducted analysis showed that environmental taxes in Ukraine (revenues and rates) are much smaller than in the developed countries of the world. But in the mean time there areneither enough available data to make an analysis of how raised environmental tax rates influenced on polluters’ activity in Ukraine nor scientific methods to develop the directions of further improvement of environmental taxes on CO