Abstract

Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, governments across the EU countries had to introduce measures to close the borders, restrict the movement of people, and suspend business activities in nonessential sectors. These restrictions threatened to result in the worst economic shock since the Great Depression of the 1930s. This situation forced the EU leaders to quickly implement urgent measures in the form of stimulating packages in order to avoid a catastrophic economic collapse. The measures, however, have been implemented without coordination and insufficiently considering the solidarity principle among the Member States, which is one of the EU basic principles. In that way, the already existing gap in development among the EU economies has become even more pronounced, which will certainly have an impact on the convergence process in the EU. In that sense, this paper is aimed at analyzing the convergence process among the EU economies during the period from 2004 to 2020 and comparing differences among the EU member states during the pandemic crisis (in 2020) and the global economic crisis (in 2008). To define the policy recommendations for overcoming the crisis and for obtaining a satisfactory level of real convergence and nominal convergence, Hierarchical Agglomerative Clustering (HAC) was performed on the data for 2020 and five clusters were derived.

摘要

由于 Covid-19 大流行，欧盟各国政府不得不采取措施关闭边境、限制人员流动并暂停非必要部门的商业活动。这些限制有可能导致自 1930 年代大萧条以来最严重的经济冲击。这种情况迫使欧盟领导人以刺激方案的形式迅速实施紧急措施，以避免灾难性的经济崩溃。然而，这些措施的实施没有协调，也没有充分考虑到作为欧盟基本原则之一的成员国之间的团结原则。这样一来，欧盟经济体之间已经存在的发展差距就更加明显，这必将对欧盟的趋同进程产生影响。从这个意义上说，本文旨在分析 2004 年至 2020 年期间欧盟经济体之间的趋同过程，并比较欧盟成员国在大流行危机（2020 年）和全球经济危机（2008 年）期间的差异。为了确定克服危机和获得令人满意的实际收敛和名义收敛水平的政策建议，对 2020 年的数据进行了层次凝聚聚类（HAC），并得出了五个聚类。