The outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic forced all the countries either to suspend the teaching and learning activities or to convert them into an online system. In March 2020, most educational institutions around the world eliminated face-to-face schooling and switched it to distance learning in order to reduce the spread of Covid-19. In some countries, parts of the formal education system (or the entire system) did not reopen in that academic year, while in others, the formal education system had been gradually reopened untill the present time. The aim of this research is to analyze the impact of the online schooling in the higher education system, and its objective is to identify if the online education is as effective as the offline one. The paper analyzes and synthesizes the main bibliographic sources in the field of education during pandemic times, the research being quantitative, from primary sources -analysis of statistical data provided by the questionaire that was administrated to the Bucharest University of Economic Studies students'.

Innovation makes an essential contribution to the economic and social progress of all countries, regardless their level of development. The aim of this research is to analyze Romania's national innovation system, and its objective is to identify the evolution of the innovation concept, from its emergence to the treatment of innovation at national / regional level, as a system (through the decisive contribution of OECD and EU). The paper analyzes and synthesizes the main bibliographic sources in the field of innovation, the research being quantitative, from secondary sources -analysis of statistical data provided by Eurostat and by the Romanian National Institute of Statistics, to identify the level of innovation performance in the EU and also Romania's position within the Union, based on the composite innovation index. Following the research, it can be seen that innovation, in terms of defining the term and the conceptual approach, has seen a continuous evolution, from Schumpeter's theory, which regards innovation as a source of business cycles (1939), to innovation, seen as a result of processes within a system (Miettinen, 2002). The research highlights the negative evolution of the performance of the Romanian innovative system within the EU (2019: 22.46% of Sweden's performance and 34.4% of the EU average performance), given that the horizon of the last relevant strategy (2020) has been exceeded and no other strategy has been developed yet.