Studia i Prace WNEiZ US

In Poland, the importance of innovation policy has been underestimated for a long time. Finally, the attention of the state authorities was directed at designing and implementation of the innovation policy tools when the country became a member of the European Union. However, in the period of 2004–2015, despite the increasing (both European and global) popularity of tax incentives, the use of the instruments in Poland was very limited. The aim of the article is to (1) analyze the factors that contributed to the above-mentioned state of affairs and (2) initially assess the effectiveness and potential further use of the new tax instrument – i.e., the tax breaks supporting the development of R&D activity which were implemented in Poland in the period 2016–2018. The research methods used involve observation (including participant observation), analysis of statistical data and documents, and literature review. The research indicates that the use of R&D tax incentives in Poland was limited by the way of organizing the distribution of funds coming from the Cohesion Fund and the EU Structural Funds (constituting a very important source of state support for R&D activities in Poland), which favored the use of direct instruments instead of e.g. tax breaks. In ad- dition, the tax incentives which were implemented in Poland over the period 2004–2015 were designed in a manner that was not attractive from the point of view of their potential beneficiaries. The experience of other countries shows that the effectiveness of R&D tax breaks is similar to the effectiveness of direct policy instruments. Because of that, the decision on state intervention by the means of tax incentives or direct instruments is to a large extent dependent on the balance of advantages and disadvantages of using individual intervention tools. Regarding the advantages, lower administrative costs are the most important in case of the tax incentives. Moreover, these instruments should be characterized by transparency and ease of use, which, unfortunately, could not be considered as strong sides of R&D tax breaks in Poland, and thus negatively influenced the use of the above-mentioned instruments by the entrepreneurs.