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The pandemic and the financial crisis were of course caused by very different events and one should therefore be careful at comparing them – but they both had a tremendously negative impact on GDP and therefore some comparison may be enlightening.
The great lockdown started just over half a year ago but the impact on GDP was very swift. The second quarter of 2020 saw declines in GDP that were bigger than the cumulative losses from the financial crisis in a majority of EU countries, see Figure 1.
In fact, the financial crisis was only more costly by this measure in Greece, the three Baltic countries, Ireland, Finland and (only just) in Luxembourg and Romania. For all other countries, the pandemic has been more costly in GDP terms than the financial crisis.
Figure 1: Impact on GDP from the corona crisis and from the financial crisis
