Economic instruments in the environmental accounts, chapter 5 and 6 in the SEEA manual Environmental expenditure Environmental taxes Environmental subsidies Permits to access the resources (e.g. fishing and water rights) and emission permits

Definition of Environmental protection Includes all measures and activities aiming to prevent, reduce or eliminate environmental pollution caused by activities of enterprises. Excluded are measures that are aimed at products, or natural resource management (including energy management) and health and safety. Environmental Protection Expenditure in industry

Environmental expenditure Structural Business Statistics, Council Regulation No 58/97 evaluate the costs of complying with environmental regulations improve the design and implementation of environmental regulations Classification of Environmental Protection Activities and Expenditure (CEPA)

Today Environmental expenditure, OECD, Eurostat Environmental taxes, OECD & Eurostat has common definition Environmental subsidies: different definitions, work in progress Environmental emissions trade, soon to become a statistic source

Environmental taxes ● Identify taxes that came under the OECD and EUROSTAT definition “…it has been chosen to single out the tax bases that seem to have a particular environmental relevance, and to consider all taxes levied on these tax bases as environmentally related regardless of the motives behind their introduction, their names etc.” ● Allocate environmental taxes by industry ● Use the CEPA classification also for taxes?

Environmental taxes/ GDP in %

Definitions - subsidies ● Narrow definition in the SNA not including e.g. investment subsidies ● Environmentally motivated subsidy determined by the motive of the subsidy, according to OECD Database ● Environmentally harmful subsidies No harmonised definition

”Good” environmental subsidies - effect with different definitions

Suggested timeline and process To collect new experiences at this London group meeting. To collect experience of the ESS community. To formulate a draft text on relevant topics and send it out to the London group in October. To invite the two working groups "Environmental Accounts" and "Environmental Expenditure Statistics" of Eurostat for further discussions on the draft text in May To have a suggested text ready in September 2007.

Future work ● Suggestion: That OECD, Eurostat and some interested countries work together on filling the economic instruments database at OECD/EEA with data disaggregated by industry. That we work together on definitions. That the emissions and energy data can easily be available for analysts so that the efficiency of the instruments can be assessed.