Because the lifting of lockdown measures is proceeding at a more gradual pace than assumed in the Commission’s Spring Forecast, the impact on economic activity in 2020 will be more significant than anticipated. The Summer 2020 Economic Forecast released on 7 July projects that the euro area economy will contract by 8.7% in 2020 and grow by 6.1% in 2021. The EU economy is forecast to contract by 8.3% in 2020 and grow by 5.8% in 2021. The contraction in 2020 is, therefore, projected to be significantly greater than the 7.7% projected for the euro area and 7.4% for the EU as a whole in the Spring Forecast. Growth in 2021 will also be slightly less robust than projected in the spring. The shock to the EU economy is symmetric in that the pandemic has hit all Member States. However, both the decline in output in 2020 and the strength of the rebound in 2021 are set to differ markedly. The differences in the scale of the impact of the pandemic and the strength of recoveries across Member States are now forecast to be even more pronounced than originally expected in the Spring Forecast.