The Twenty-Fourth of February 2022 marked the beginning one of the greatest humanitarian crisis in Europe. Within the first six days of the war, the number of Ukrainian refugees exceeded 4 million, which is more than twice the total number of incomers who arrived in Europe during the Syrian migration throughout 2015. Most of them found themselves in Poland; thus, an urgent need for ad hoc humanitarian and systemic aid arose. To cope with the situation, a number of changes to the Polish law were introduced so as to provide help to the refugees (mainly women and children) from Ukraine. To systematise the changes, the authors of the study analysed the legal acts that had been created or amended for the purposes of providing aid to the refugees staying in Poland. The research study has shown that, in the first days following the war’s outbreak, the measures of key importance were the grassroot initiatives taken by Polish citizens, but as days went by, systemic aid became indispensable. Moreover, non-standard needs had to be handled due to the fact that the refugees were mainly women and children rather than entire families. In conclusion, the war in Ukraine has shown how important it is to have refugee aid procedures at hand and to have a detailed guidance prepared beforehand.

Regional Innovation and Smart Specialisation Strategies (RIS3) are treated as one of the key tools in implementing the concept of smart and sustainable growth. The strategies make it possible to focus investments on research, development and innovation (RD & I) in the areas showing the greatest economic and competitive potential of the regions. The article is based on the assumption that innovativeness on the one hand determines and on the other hand is determined by smart and sustainable growth. The aim of the analysis is to present new research assumptions and the results of the regional benchmarking based on a synthetic measure of development, and verification of the relationships between the level of innovative development and the economic development in the regions. This article presents the results of a research study covering all the sixteen regions of Poland, the outcome of which is an indicator of regional innovativeness based on 17 features, which means that the study considered a total of 2992 features. The methods applied in the study included the zero unitarisation method, the linear ordering method, and the Pearson correlation coefficient. The completed research study has shown the stability of positions held by the individual regions and the considerable, persisting disproportions in the innovation development between the regions taking the positions at both ends of the ranking. Moreover, a moderate positive correlation was identified between the GDP per capita level and the value of the synthetic measure of regional innovation development in 2009. The completed analyses made it possible to formulate the conclusions that show the benefits, weaknesses and dilemmas related to the introduction of smart specialisations for sustainable and innovative regional development in Poland over the past decade.

Regional development is a complex economic category and a commonly used term today, yet it is vaguely defined and, therefore, interpreted implicitly and understood intuitively. From a statistical point of view, this concept, on account of its imprecision and ambiguity, is a kind of multidimensional characteristic which may be measured, though not conclusively. Due to the lack of a universal set of diagnostic variables adopted in taxonomic analyses, the quantitative approach to the examined research area, which is in most cases presented descriptively, poses the main problem. The objectives of the article are to rank the provinces of Poland in terms of regional development in the years 2006–2018 and to assess the similarity of results over time. The research study is based on linear ordering methods within the scope of multidimensional statistical analysis. The results of the conducted analyses allowed us to rank the provinces of Poland in terms of regional development in the years 2006–2018 and to assess the similarity of the results over time. The results of the analysis indicate a clear stabilization of high ranked positions during the examined period, last places are generally taken by the same regions. This situation may indicate an increase or at least strengthening of the disproportions between the most and least developed regions in Poland. Theoretical considerations presented in the article as well as the empirical results of our own research may provoke more detailed discussion on the subject.

Smart specialization is one of the major public policies aimed at stimulation of innovations. The aim of this paper is to examine the interactions between implementation of innovation strategy in the form of RIS3, barriers and bottlenecks of innovation diffusion, and development of innovativeness in enterprises on a regional level. The analysis was based on 30 individual in-depth interviews with representatives of institutions implementing the assumptions of smart specialization in the regions, as well as cross-sectional survey questionnaires on a sample of 250 enterprises engaged in innovative activities in Poland sample. The results of this study show that the applied forms of innovation support, implemented within the framework of RIS3, are not adapted to the realities of the operation of enterprises. Improving this situation requires understanding the actual needs of entrepreneurs. It is proposed to increase the level of stakeholder interaction and communication. Improved measures should be tested and evaluated based on their ability to stimulate business innovation.

Measures taken to minimize the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the economy involved spending public funds in a different way than was planned in the budgets of public sector units. National and local governments around the world introduced measures to limit the spread of the virus, translating, among other things, into restrictions on the activities of economic entities. This situation has resulted, on the one hand, in a reduction of both tax and fee revenues and other public and legal charges not only to the state budget, but also to the various levels of territorial sector units, and, on the other hand, in increased spending by these institutions. It has become a common opinion that the pandemic has affected the financial condition of local government units, but there is a lack of analysis in the literature at the level of provinces, which are financed differently than the municipal level in Poland. This study aimed to assess the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the financial condition of local government provinces in Poland as depicted by fundamental budget indicators. The analysis showed that based on indicators that, according to theory, should describe the financial situation of territorial sector units, in emergency situations such as the COVID-19 pandemic, do not reflect the actual picture. Our considerations indicate that certain theoretical assumptions are not suitable for “difficult times”. If one were to base only on numbers and theory, one would be led to the erroneous conclusion that the pandemic did not financially affect territorial sector units at the regional (provincial) level. Działania podejmowane poprzez każdą jednostkę samorządu terytorialnego (JST) w celu minimalizowania wpływu pandemii COVID-19 na gospodarkę wiązały się z koniecznością wydatkowania środków publicznych w inny sposób niż było to zaplanowane w budżetach tych jednostek. Powszechna stała się opinia, że pandemia wpłynęła na kondycję finansową JST, brak jednak analiz na poziomie województw, które są finansowane inaczej niż gminy. Za cel pracy przyjęto ocenę wpływu pandemii COVID-19 na kondycję finansową województw samorządowych w Polsce obrazowaną przez podstawowe wskaźniki budżetowe. Analiza pokazała, że opieranie się na wskaźnikach, które według teorii powinny obrazować sytuację finansową JST, w sytuacjach nadzwyczajnych, jak pandemia COVID-19, nie oddaje faktycznego obrazu sytuacji.