H87 - International Fiscal Issues; International Public GoodsReturn

The debate surrounding the provision of welfare by state institutions has been widely discussed in the field of political economics since the 1930s. Related research also focuses on welfare supply at an international system level. This article assesses whether international cooperation in the area of sharing remote sensing data leads to the supply of global public goods, which to date has not yet been discussed in related scholarly literature. The supply of global public goods is assessed within the GEO international regime and leads to the use of the non-rivalrous GEOSS, which can be accessed by every socio-economic group in every UN member country including future generations. However, providing the benefit of GEOSS is not always favourable because of the low number of financially participating consumers.

Both the Ministry of Finance of the Czech Republic and the European Commission are going to impose new CO2 taxation. Within the scope of this news, it is interesting to focus on the current CO2 taxation in the European Union Member States. This article first presents some theoretical concepts regarding environmental and CO2 taxation, including a focus on the political tasks regarding CO2 taxation in the Czech Republic. Then both the methodology and data are presented; research in international databases is the key method. The third chapter of the paper deals with the research results; it focuses on current national systems for CO2 taxation in particular European Union Member States. Regarding the energy sector, the comparison of particular tax rates is provided. The study deals with the time period until the end of June 2012. The key part of the third chapter focuses on the CO2 taxation proposals by both the Ministry of Finance of the Czech Republic and the European Commission, including a comparison of the proposed CO2 tax rates. Finally, the results are discussed and proposals for both additional research and CO2 tax modelling are made.

The European Commission is going to discuss a revision of Directive 2003/96/EC, restructuring the Community framework for the taxation of energy products and electricity. The first proposals include a new energy taxation system, where the current energy tax is divided into two components - an energy component and a CO2 component. This article first presents theoretical concepts regarding environmental and CO2 taxation; then it concentrates on current national systems of CO2 taxation in European Union Member States with a focus on the energy and transport sectors. After making an overview of CO2 taxation, the article focuses on a comparison of national systems of CO2 taxation and indicates similarities in the taxes in their application in both the energy and transport sectors. The authors deal with all taxes that have their current tax base based on CO2 emissions or have CO2 emissions as one part of their tax base. The analysis is provided for a period until the end of 2009. Finally, the results of the comparison of CO2 taxation are discussed. The article also includes a brief overview of existing ex-post analysis of CO2 taxation in the Nordic countries of the European Union.