NEW EU COUNTRIES AFTER THE GREAT RECESSION

The outbreak of the 2007-2012 global financial crisis sparked a marked decline of the European real economy. The EU had not yet fully recovered from the challenges of the Great Recession and another threat knocked at its doors - the fiscal crisis. In the paper it is attempted to define the current economic situation of the euro area and some new EU countries using the latest available quantitative and BTS data. We analyse the main macroeconomic variables that describe aggregate economic activity: GDP, private consumption, industrial production, construction production and retail sales. These quantitative variables were matched to the corresponding qualitative indicators: the Economic Sentiment Indicator (ESI), the Consumer Sentiment Index (CSI), the business confidence indicators in industry (ICI), construction (CCI) and retail trade (RCI). The results indicate that the crisis is deeply embedded in heads of economic agents. A strong fear of the future is expressed in their pessimistic sentiments. The economic activity from the perspective of the quantitative data looks different