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The COVID-19 pandemic has affected economic activity worldwide. Despite the progress made by vaccination campaigns, important uncertainties still linger amid persistent global value chains disruptions and the ongoing energy crisis. A proper understanding of the behavior of the economy is therefore essential for future policy decisions. While there are plenty of studies regarding business cycles, using various methods from univariate filters to more complex methods, less papers focus on large scale comparisons. In this paper, we provide an overview of business cycles in European Union countries. We use the Hodrick-Prescott filter in order to measure the cyclical component of the gross domestic product and the Bry-Boschan-Quarterly algorithm for further analysis, namely the duration and the amplitude of the business cycles. Our results show that their size in European Union countries varies from 2.7 to 6 years and their amplitude is between 1.6 and 5.6 percentage points. We show that in developed economies, business cycles are more stable. Furthermore, strong correlations in terms of business cycles are found in the case of certain groups of countries, such as the Baltic ones or Belgium, Austria and France. In the case of Romania, its business cycle is more similar to the one of Bulgaria, Croatia and Slovenia. These results could provide useful information for policymakers in terms of future policy decisions conditional on both the current state of the economy and its structural characteristics. Under these circumstances, support measures should also take into consideration such properties of the economy.

The COVID-19 pandemic proved to be an unprecedented socio-economic crisis in the last decades. More than three years after its outbreak, there is still uncertainty regarding its future evolution. National and international authorities adopted a prompt and synchronized response to limit the adverse effects of the health crisis, in terms of socio-economic damage. Against this background, this paper assesses the efficiency of the measures implemented by fiscal authorities in selected Central and Eastern European countries to ameliorate the economic repercussions of the crisis. The analysis reveals that the impact of expenditure-side measures is stronger than that of revenue-side ones. Additionally, the results of a time-varying parameter model indicate that the fiscal multipliers are higher in times of crisis. In view of the ongoing war in Ukraine, the related geopolitical turmoil and energy crisis, the findings of this paper are especially pertinent, given the need for additional fiscal support.

The aim of this research is to assess the impact of the economic shocks of supply and demand generated by the COVID-19 crisis on the climate sphere at the level of the Member States of the European Union. In this respect, a macroeconomic model was used to obtain firstly an estimate of the measure of demand shock and secondly an estimate of the supply of the economy. These milestones were eventually used to estimate the impact of the two economic shocks on the level of greenhouse gas emissions. The obtained results show that both the shock from the aggregate demand area and that from the aggregate supply area had the effect of decreasing the level of greenhouse gases, leading to a positive effect on the environment. From a quantitative point of view, the model estimates show that, as a result of the manifestation of the two cumulative shocks, the level of greenhouse gas emissions could decrease by about 10%.