In 2020, the gross domestic product (GDP) of the European Union shrank to €13.4 billion because of the impact of the pandemic. In a single year, the economy suffered a 5.9 percent drop due to Covid-19, recording the first drop since 2009 (-4.3 percent). However, the impact was not equal in all Member States.

In the case of Germany, which has the largest economy in the European bloc, the weight of GDP increased from 24.8 percent in 2019 to 25.1 percent in 2020 as the German economy shrank less than the European average. France follows with 17.2 percent and Italy with 12.3 percent, making up the three largest EU economies.

This ordering of EU countries by GDP corresponds (so far) also to the ordering of countries by population. In other words, countries with more people are those that also have a larger economy, as one would expect. This trend is also confirmed in fourth place with Spain (8.4 percent), but is no longer verified in fifth place.

It is in this place that the Netherlands, which has 17.4 million people, with 6 percent appears, ahead of Poland, which, with 37 million people, corresponds to 3.9 percentt of the European GDP. This results from the fact that the Dutch GDP per capita is much higher than the Polish GDP per capita.

Portugal does not figure well in this perspective either: it maintained its weight of 1.5 percent, but appears in 14th place, while ordered by population it would be the tenth largest country in the EU. The size of the Portuguese economy is surpassed by countries with smaller populations such as the Czech Republic, Sweden, Denmark, Austria, Ireland, among others. But it is above Greece (which has a larger population than Portugal).

At the end of this list are Member States whose economy accounts for less than 1 percent of European GDP: this is the case of Malta whose economy is worth only 0.1 percent. Estonia, Cyprus and Latvia follow with 0.2 percent, Croatia, Lithuania and Slovenia with 0.4 percent, Bulgaria and Luxembourg — despite having the highest GDP per capita in the EU — with 0.5 percent and Slovakia with 0.7 percent.