Short-term exit from pandemic restrictions: did European countries’ speed converge?

Concurrently with the end of the second wave of the coronavirus pandemic, European democracies have progressively relaxed the restrictions on social mobility following the decrease in disease indexes. Did the exit speed from pandemic restrictions substantially differ across governments? This paper intends to analyze this intriguing issue, by investigating whether any convergent response of EU countries did emerge. To this aim, a convergence log-t test is performed on a panel of 25 European countries. Five different clubs emerge which suggest spatially distributed trends for relaxing stringency measures, suggesting the absence of a common European strategy to escape from the first wave pandemic. Additionally, we provide evidence of the role that economic, political, and health variables exert on these different exit strategies.