Budget reform compatible with environmental policies and Turkey assessment

Nowadays environmental issues have increased substantially, and threat the future of humanity. It is possible to solve these problems via environmental policy instruments. In recent years, it has been debated that compromising the revenue and expenditure policies of the government with environmental policies can contribute to solution of the problem. So called environmental or green budget reform is a comprehensive transformation strategy with respect to rearranging the revenue and expenditure sides of the budget for environmental purposes to fulfill environmental and economic and social objectives. In this context, various applications such as putting new environmental taxes, activating already available environmental taxes, enabling reduction of other traditional taxes, reducing or removing of environmentally harmful subsidies, increasing beneficial subsidies to the environment, taking into account public procurement and investment decisions have been implemented in. Evidence suggests that reviewing income and expenditure policies with an environmentalist perspective may be effective in reducing environmental problems. In this study, what can be done has been specified to use the budget more effectively by analyzing the structure of the Turkish budget with an environmental perspective. In Turkey, there are almost no directly environment-related taxes. It is therefore a need to re-design the indirectly environmental-related issues to ensure that they are beneficial to the environment. It can be stated that in practice environmental protection expenditure remained low compared with other expenditure. Therefore, it is a need to establish a green budget commission to address income and expenditure items in the budget to reduce or remove the environmentally harmful substances and replace them with environmentally friendly practices. Although the environment in Turkey reached a formal institutional point, it has failed to have a decisive influence on policy objectives and priorities. Participation of environmental issues in the policy-making process, inclusion of environmental concerns into economic and sectorial decisions is essential for sustainable development. Key Words: Environmental policy, environmental taxes, environmentally harmful subsidies, environmental budget reform, environmental protection expenditure