Environmental Expenditures and Environmental Investments in Ten EU Member States: Comparative Analysis and Typology at the National and Sectoral Levels

The growing emphasis on environmental sustainability within the European Union raises important questions about the nature and internal structure of corporate envi-ronmental effort. This study examines environmental expenditures - measured as in-termediate consumption of environmental protection services - and environmental investments - measured as gross fixed capital formation for environmental protection - in ten EU member states over the period 2015-2022, using data from the Eurostat En-vironmental Protection Expenditure Accounts. The analysis is conducted at both the national and sectoral levels and covers four NACE Rev.2 sectors: agriculture, mining, manufacturing, and electricity. The results reveal a pronounced asymmetry, with en-vironmental expenditures consistently exceeding environmental investments, sug-gesting that environmental effort is more strongly oriented towards maintenance than transformation. This asymmetry varies substantially across countries and even more across sectors: agriculture displays a strongly expenditure-dominated profile, whereas the electricity sector shows a more balanced pattern. On the basis of the relative inten-sity of expenditures and investments, the study proposes an interpretative four-quadrant typology of environmental strategies, distinguishing active transfor-mation, investment focus, maintenance mode, and passive profiles. The findings high-light the importance of sectoral disaggregation and show that the internal composition of environmental effort is as informative as its overall level.