The aim of this study was to identify the factors inducing customers to choose cashless payments made with payment cards at retail and service outlets during the COVID-19 pandemic. We identified factors that are crucial for consumers’ functioning under pandemic conditions, but which have so far been neglected in research. The estimated logit model indicates that the variables significantly influencing the more frequent choice of payment cards at retail outlets are related to the fear of infection and perception of the advantages of new technological solutions in connection with social distancing. Our study shows that, in addition to sociodemographic characteristics such as age and level of education, emotionally motivated factors induced by the pandemic have begun to play an important role in the transition to cashless payment.

Changes in recent years have resulted in an increase in the ways in which renewable energy is used and shared in total electricity generation. Each type of renewable energy is characterised by its uniqueness of the physical specificity and, therefore, differences in technological solutions. In this study, one of the methods of multidimensional comparative analysis (WAP)—Hellwig’s taxonomic measure of development—was used to assess the level of development of electricity production from renewable sources. Twenty-eight countries were surveyed, including 27 countries of the current European Union and the United Kingdom. Panel models were used to describe the relationship between the share of electricity production from RES in total electricity production and GDP per capita, public spending by countries on energy as a percentage of GDP as well as electricity production from water, wind, solar, and biogas per capita. The presented synthetic measures confirmed the more favourable situation of the rich northern EU countries in the production of electricity from renewable sources (solar, wind, hydro, and bio), at the same time highlighting problems with the greening of electricity production in a large group of the new EU member states. The panel study confirmed the importance of differences in economic potential and wealth between EU countries for the development of the use of RES for electricity production.

This paper presents empirical research on the employment attitudes of Ukrainian households that fled to one of the largest cities in Poland, during a mass migration at the onset of the Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. It identifies the characteristics of households with adult members immediately employed and those planning for future employment in Poland. Based on socio-economic migration theories and empirical knowledge, the paper delves into the role of the economic motive for these households’ migration. The study is based on household-level survey data collected in Krakow in May 2022. The Bayesian Averaging of Classical Estimates technique is employed to identify the determinants of household members’ employment and their plans in this regard. The findings confirm that financial reasons partly drove Ukrainian households to migrate during the war; however, public and private assistance played distinct roles in their prompt inclusion in the labour market and their planning for employment in Poland. Additionally, the findings allow us to conclude that knowledge of the Polish language consistently played a role in their professional activation abroad.

Motivation: Online shopping has gained increased economic importance as a result of restrictions on brick-and-mortar purchases due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Notwithstanding the natural partial return of consumers to direct purchases with the lifting of restrictions by the authorities, interest in online shopping does not return to pre-pandemic levels. Aim: The aim of the article is to verify the influence of various factors on the propensity to use online shopping in the European Union countries in the period 2010–2021. Due to the temporal and geographical scope of data, the panel method was used in the research. Results: The research on the determinants of online shopping, carried out by the authors, showed the statistical significance of all eight dependent variables affecting the share of people who shop online in the societies of the European Union countries. The increase in the use of online shopping is influenced by both the quality of Internet connections, the general frequency of Internet use, readiness to search the Internet for information about goods and services and the use of Internet banking. This regularity also occurs in the case of the share of older people in society, the share of people with at least the second level of education, the share of people employed in science and technology, and the level of GDP per capita.

The problem of the exclusion of some households, in particular those less affluent, from the use of financial services available on the market, including savings, is an important issue in the literature due to the objectively identified negative social and economic consequences of such exclusion. The research objective of the article is to attempt to identify factors related to savings exclusion which determine the share of gross savings in GDP in the new European Union member states. To achieve the goal, a panel data model was estimated. The set of statistically significant factors that adversely affect the creation of gross savings in the economy, and thus the higher level of savings exclusion, include the unemployment rate, social contributions, household debt, the Gini coefficient, and the share of people aged 25-49 in the total population. All these variables are negatively correlated with the explained variable, which means that an increase in their value causes a fall in gross savings. The results of the research have shown that such a highly aggregated measure as gross savings in the economy can be useful for analysing selected aspects of savings exclusion occurring in the examined new member states of the EU.