"In 2019, before the crisis, EU-wide inequality had reached its lowest level since the 2007 Eastern enlargement. After many years of stagnation, income disparities had eventually started to decline in 2016. The impact of the pandemic is difficult to assess, due to the lack of household survey data. Ignoring the possible changes of the distribution of disposable income within countries in 2020, where available evidence is ambiguous at best, we base our calculations for the EU-wide inequality in 2020 on the meanwhile known disparities of growth between Member States. Our estimate shows that the pandemic slowed down the previous decline strongly, but did not reverse it."

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