Budgetary support and tax expenditures for fossil fuels – An inventory for six non-OECD EU countries (IVM Institute)

Financial support for the production and consumption of fossil fuels, while clearly at odds with the objective of greenhouse gas reduction, is still a widespread phenomenon throughout the world. The Europe 2020 strategy calls for a phase-out of environmentally harmful subsidies (EHS), limiting exceptions to people with social needs. Subsidies to fossil fuels constitute a significant part of these EHS. In 2010 the OECD started collecting data on budgetary support and tax expenditures that relate to fossil fuels. The OECD data may be a useful source of information feeding into policy discussions about the impact that fossil-fuel subsidies and their possible phase-out, as foreseen in the EU’s Resource Efficiency Roadmap, can have on the environment and the broader economy. However, six EU Member States are at present not OECD Members: Bulgaria, Cyprus, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta and Romania. This study by the Institute for Environmental Studies (IVM) is intended to fill the data gap for these countries. The report is available to download on the European Commission’s website.