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.

中文翻译：

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估计欧洲 COVID-19 大流行之前的生产功能

该研究的目的是讨论大流行事件的后果，以估计欧盟的经济增长机制。最近的 COVID-19 死亡人数不断增加，引起了人们对这种意外但并非史无前例的情况对社会和经济的影响的关注。在目前的研究中，重点是估计一种疾病的经济影响，这会减少工作人口。事实证明，在分析所有 27 个欧盟成员国的劳动力和资本转化为产出时，突出的基本生产函数框架可能无法提供一致的结果。这是因为 COVID-19 对每个欧盟国家的不对称影响。对流行病死亡人数的历史观点表明，欧洲经历了许多类似的人口发展时期。这些是遭受致命疾病爆发的个别国家、地区或最近的整个大陆（和世界）。该论文提供了一项荟萃分析，并从众多来源中汲取灵感，以尽可能广泛地报道人口减少的事件。由于经济后果的相似性，有关战争死亡人数和种族灭绝案件的信息补充了叙述。结论提请注意这样一个事实，即在 COVID-19 后时代，任何与增长相关的研究都将缺乏时间序列来描述负责在国家和欧盟层面产生 GDP 的新的潜在转型机制。这篇论文的贡献在于为未来任何试图评估大流行对经济增长的影响的研究提供了一个参考点，