Original scientific paper
https://doi.org/10.1080/1331677X.2021.1934507
Has COVID-19 pandemic crisis changed the EU convergence patterns?
Aleksandra Fedajev
Magdalena Radulescu
Ana Gabriela Babucea
Vladimir Mihajlovic
Zahid Yousaf
Raica Milićević
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.
Keywords
Pandemic crisis; convergence; the EU; Shannon entropy index; cluster analysis
Hrčak ID:
302253
URI
Publication date:
31.3.2023.
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