Environmental Audit as a Tool for the Country's Eco-Innovative Development Ensuring

The issues of environmental impact reduction became a significant factor in the decision-making process for the development of organizations in the EU. Systematic environmental management is an effective way of solving environmental problems arising in organizations’ activities. Creating an effective environmental audit system is an essential step in ensuring the regulatory response to the extensive level of environmental pollution. To identify the role of environmental audit in the growth of environmental innovation activity of the country, a number of panel multiple regression dependencies were constructed. The survey database includes data for 28 countries of the European Union for the period 2010-2017. Factor variables of the study were the absolute number of environmental audit organizations, their ratio to the total number of enterprises, and the number of environmental audit and management sites. The resulting variables were the value of the index of eco-innovation of countries and its components. The conducted analysis showed that in the European Union countries, an environmental audit is an effective tool for ensuring their eco-innovative development. It is revealed that the biggest positive effect of the growth of the number of environmental audit organizations is manifested in the growth of the scope of eco-innovation activities and the volume of its financing, as well as the increase of the level of environmental responsibility of the organizations. On the other hand, the increase in the density of environmental audit organizations in relation to the number of enterprises is a factor hampering the country's environmental innovation. Research for different groups of countries proves that increasing the level of eco-innovation progress of states leads to an increase in the positive effects of the functioning of the environmental audit system for further eco-innovative development. At the same time, the maximum level of impact of environmental audit on the intensity of eco-innovation activity is observed for countries with an average level of progress. Thus, the necessity of the development of an environmental audit in the formulation of Ukraine's environmental policy was proved. Keywords: environmental audit, environmental reporting, environmental management, eco-innovation activities, environment.