The accelerated development of information and communication technologies (ICT) over the last three decades has encouraged researchers to analyse the impact of this phenomenon on the labour market. The potential decline in employment resulting from the proliferation of ICT may reduce access to basic energy services and even lead to energy poverty in the form of inability to heat the apartment as needed, allocating a significant part of revenues to expenses related to heating or problems with the timely payment of energy bills. Because access to energy is of fundamental importance for improving the quality of life and is crucial from the point of view of economic development, it is justified to verify the hypothesis that the accelerated development of ICT in EU countries may contribute to an increase in unemployment and, consequently, translate into a higher level of energy poverty. The described research results were obtained thanks to a comparative factor analysis based on secondary data. The analysis showed that in the period 2009–2019, the use of ICT had a limited impact on the unemployment rate in the EU and had a significant impact on reducing the level of energy poverty in EU Member States. As regards the impact of ICT factors on the level of energy poverty, only IP traffic showed a significant impact in this area. When it comes to the labour market, it was found that employment is chiefly influenced by economic factors such as labour costs.

In the present paper, using the panel regression model with fixed effects, it was verified whether there is a relationship between intangible assets and R&D expenses on one side and the EBITDA level and market capitalization of 222 publicly listed companies from the Information and Communication Technology sector. Our research confirmed that in the group of companies from the ICT sector there is a medium of dependence of EBITDA on intangible assets and R&D expenditure.At the same time, at the level of the entire ICT sector, no relationship was found between the level of intangible assets and expenditures on research and development on the one hand, and the level of market capitalization of companies on the other. A similar lack of dependence was recorded in the ICT services and ICT manufacturing subsectors.In addition, there was a high correlation at the level of 74% between the level of intangible assets and R&D expenditure on the one hand and the EBITDA level obtained by companies from the ICT manufacturing sub-sector and the lack of such correlation in the ICT services sub-sector.Our research suggests that, in particular, the financial results of companies in the ICT sector may directly depend on the amount of expenses that companies incur in order to introduce new innovative solutions into their market offer.In the case of the European Union ICT sector, its Value Added (VA) amounted to 581 billion euros, it employed 5.8 million people and spent 30 billion euros on business enterprise expenditure on R&D (BERD). The ICT sector represented 3.9% of the EU value added, 2.5% of total employment, 15.7% of total BERD, and 18.6% and 20.6% of the R&D personnel and researchers in the EU, respectively.The growing importance of the ICT sector is linked to its better business indicators compared to other sectors of

Due to the fact that the European Union is striving to achieve its sustainable development goals, in particular goal No. 7, which is to provide users with low-emission, and cheap access to, energy, this article’s aim is to verify whether there is a relationship between R&D expenditure and key energy variables in the EU countries in 2010–2020. Data on R&D expenditures incurred by the EU Member States in the period 2010–2020 were used for the research and were tested using the Autoregressive Distributed Lags Model (ARDL). The study identified a strong positive relationship between total R&D expenditure and the increase in energy consumption from renewable energy sources, and a smaller impact of total R&D expenditure as well as enterprise R&D expenditure on the increase in fossil energy consumption. Also noted was a weak relationship between R&D expenditure and electricity and gas prices for both household and non-household customers. The obtained results prove that in the context of the level of implementation of SDG No. 7 in the EU countries, R&D expenditure results in greater access to low-emission energy from renewable sources, but the achievement of the aforementioned sustainable development goal in other aspects (reduction in energy consumption from fossil fuels and ensuring lower price energy) is not possible with the current level of R&D expenditure.