Macro-economic evolutions during the COVID-19 health crisis – large versus small European countries

The COVID-19 crisis affected the global economy at unprecedented and unexpected levels. Practitioners and researchers are concerned about the economic consequences of the crisis and analyses of the economic impacts of the health crisis are required. The present paper had as main objective to analyze the economic evolution of European countries during the main years of the COVID-19 pandemics, respectively 2020 and 2021. The methodology used is based on descriptive statistics for a few macroeconomic indicators and for the evolution of the COVID-19 cases and also on statistics based on correlation between these indicators. The European countries were categorized in four groups according to geographical region and size and a few countries were selected for analysis from each group. The research revealed that the impact of the COVID-19 outbreak was large in all analyzed economies in respect to GDP evolution. Inflation seemed to be highly affected by the COVID-19 outbreak, both in terms of evolution of the indicator with increases in all countries, but also in terms of correlation with the number of COVID-19 cases in the case of Western European countries. CEE countries were more affected by the COVID-19 crisis in terms of inflation, compared to Western European countries.