Ekonomi Politika ve Finans Araştırmaları Dergisi

Öz

Covid-19 outbreak, which occurred in China in December 2019, affected almost the entire world in a short time. In the past period, many sectors of the economy have contracted, resulting in high unemployment and inflation rates in many countries. Increasing expenditures of the health sector in the fight against the epidemic caused high increases in public expenditures. Most countries that have opted for borrowing and expanding the money supply to finance public expenditures have seen increases in the rate of inflation. In this study, the world's twenty largest economies are compared based on macroeconomic data and public finance indicators. In this context, three different time periods, namely before Covid-19 outbreak, the initial period of the epidemic and the period after the outbreak, were examined separately using the Hierarchical Clustering Analysis and Non-Hierarchical Clustering Analysis methods, using the K-Means method. In the findings, it was seen that the country transitions between the relevant periods were higher in the clusters obtained with macroeconomic indicators compared to the clusters obtained with the public finance indicators. Moreover, Turkey's macroeconomic, while Japan alone formed a cluster in each period in terms of public finance indicators and found that it decomposes from other countries.