The aim of this study is a comparative analysis of the legal regulations that established public tributes in Poland and Ukraine and the doctrine of tax and public law, and an attempt to define the concept of public tributes. The aim of this study was to examine the approach of the legislator, in particular on the grounds of the Constitution, to the issue related to public tributes. Determining the difficulties and growth of public levies in Poland and Ukraine was especially crucial. The analyses conducted for this study should support the idea that a systemic definition of public tributes is needed. It should be noted that currently there are no recent comparative studies on public contributions in Poland and Ukraine.
Our analysis showed that public tributes constitute a category of benefits of public character whose collection is anchored in constitutional norms. Historically, public tributes have evolved from personal, in-kind tributes to the tributes most useful nowadays—monetary ones. The generally accepted principle of the division of public tributes into payable and non-payable ones is accepted by the authors and the aforementioned division is characteristic of both the Polish and Ukrainian legal systems. It should be noted that the different views on the division of public tributes are present, such an example being the division suggested by B.Gryziak, who proposes to divide public tributes into three categories: payable, unpaid and hybrid tributes.
It should be noted that the analysis made allowed us to present the general concept of public tributes in the Polish and Ukrainian legal systems. Such systemic analysis led us to the clear conclusion that public tributes in Poland and Ukraine are part of public law. Therefore, the introduction of public tributes or any change therein can only take place on a constitutional basis. Our detailed analysis of the Ukrainian legislation led us to the thought that the collective concept of public tributes is unknown to the Ukrainian legislature and that the equivalent of the Polish concept of public tribute in Ukrainian is державні збори. We found that державні збори is a collection of all tax revenues, in contrast to the Polish notion of public tributes, under which term the legislature, in a sense, standardised the groups that will be included in the category of tributes. Consequently, it can be concluded that while in the Polish system, this concept appears in the provisions of the Constitution, the Ukrainian legislature did not order this terminologically at the constitutional level but left it to the ordinary legislature. According to the authors, creating a system definition of public levies based on the characteristics rather than the categories of individual benefits would remedy the ills that exist in the functioning systems in both Poland and Ukraine.