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The paper deals with the issue of taxes and charges in road freight transport in the Slovak Republic and the selected European countries. The aim is to compare and evaluate the position of the Slovak carriers towards foreign ones when doing business in the common European market. The selected kinds of taxes and charges (or costs items) relate to different production factors of road transport undertakings (vehicles, drivers, road infrastructure). Also, the legislation on taxes and charges differs among individual countries and differences can be observed in the principles of taxation. The objective isto make a comprehensive objectified comparison when taking into account several selected taxes, charges and costs in road transport. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper first briefly reviews the extent to which profit maximising transport firms with identical cost functions and producing identical transport services pass-on output taxes to transport users under perfect competition, under different forms of imperfect competition and when they act as monopolists. Then the analysis is extended to derive the pass-on rates and activity reductions caused by an output tax when firms care both about profit and consumer surplus, produce symmetrically differentiated services and compete simultaneously in quantities and fare and when they collude. The pass-on rates and activity reductions are highest under collusion and lowest under Cournot competition when they produce complementary services. When they produce substitute services, the result is ambiguous and the competitive situation that yields highest pass-on depends on the firms’ objective functions and how fiercely they compete. Two important counterintuitive results are that the more intensely the firms compete and the more weight they put on consumer surplus, the higher the pass-on rates are. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]