Conformal Decomposition of the Effective Action and Covariant Curvature Expansion

The class of effective actions exactly reproducing the conformal anomaly in 4D is considered. It is demonstrated that the freedom within this class can be fixed by the choice of the conformal gauge. The conformal invariant part of the generic one-loop effective action expanded in the covariant series up to third order in the curvature is rewritten in the new conformal basis. The possible applications of the obtained results are discussed.