While assessing the economic impacts of corruption, the corruption-related transmission channels which influence taxation as such have to be duly considered. Taking the example of the Czech Republic, this article aims to evaluate the impacts corruption has on the size of the shadow economy as well as on the individual sources of long-term economic growth, making use of a transmission channel through which corruption affects the tax burden components. Using the method of an extended DSGE model, it confirms the initial assumption that an increase in perceived corruption supports the shadow economy’s growth, but at the same time, it demonstrates that corruption and especially its perception has a significantly different effect on two key areas—the capital accumulation and the labour force size. It further identifies another sector of the economy representing taxes which are prone to tax evasion while asserting that corruption has a much more destructive effect on this sector of the economy, offering generalized implications for other post-communist EU member states in a similar situation.

Despite environmental taxation’s presumed advantages for long-term sustainable development goals, the problematic institutional conditions associated with high levels of corruption could become a significant obstacle undermining these efforts. Taking the example of the Czech Republic as a benchmark, the aim of this article is to evaluate the impact of corruption and its implications on the size of the official and the shadow economy in the sector burdened with environmental excise tax while confronting it with the sector not burdened with such tax. In terms of methodology, an extended DSGE (Dynamic stochastic general equilibrium) model has been used. In the case of the shadow economy, the two sectors, burdened and not burdened with environmental taxes, followed a similar trend. However, concerning the official economy, this research found out that if environmental taxation is not applied, then lower, non-systemic corruption has a positive effect on the size of production as the effect of increased workforce motivation clearly dominates, suppressing the effect of reduced capital accumulation. Conversely, in the sector burdened with environmental taxation, corruption has an almost unequivocally negative effect on the production economy. In this sense, corruption has the capacity to limit the implementation of sustainable development policies including the European Green Deal, especially if it is systemic in nature.