Estimating Production Function Before Covid-19 Pandemic in Europe

Abstract

The purpose of the study is to discuss consequences of pandemic events for estimating the economic growth mechanism in the European Union. The most recent COVID-19 growing death toll has drawn the attention to impact such unexpected, but not unprecedented situations have on society and economy. In the current study the focus is on estimating economic effects of a disease, which reduces the working population. It turns out that the prominent basic production function framework may fail to deliver consistent results, when analyzing transformation of labor and capital into output in all 27-EU Member countries. This is because of asymmetric impact of COVID-19 on each individual EU-country.

A historical perspective on epidemic death toll shows that Europe experienced numerous periods of a similar demographic developments. Those were individual countries, regions, or most recently the whole continent (and the world) that suffered from outbreaks of a deadly disease. The paper offers a meta-analysis, and draws from numerous sources to provide as wide as possible coverage on population-decreasing events. Due to similarity in their economic consequences, information about death toll of wars and genocide cases supplements the narration. Conclusions draw the attention to the fact that in the post-COVID-19 era any growth related studies will suffer from the lack of time series that describe the new underlying transformation mechanism that is responsible for generating the GDP at country and EU-level. The contribution of the paper is in offering a point of reference for any future studies that will try to assess pandemic effects in regard to economic growth, economies of scale or any other production function framework element.