Résumé
The Wholesale and retail trade—repair of motor vehicles and motorcycles (section G of the National Classification of Economic Activities)—represents a fundamental component of the Romanian economic mechanism. The understanding of the economic and social impact of this sector is important through both the substantiation of the strategies of competing companies, as well as through the perspective of the public policies that have an impact on this sector and on the socioeconomic environment. The purpose of this study is to analyze the impact of COVID-19 on the Wholesale and retail—repair of motor vehicles and motorcycles sector in Romania during the state of emergency period and to highlight the main measures proposed for diminishing the effects of COVID-19 and re-launching the sector. The research methods used to achieve the purpose of this study are the bibliometric analysis, the descriptive analysis and the k-means algorithm. The results obtained highlight an impact of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which differs based on the nature, the goods (food and non-food products) and the trading method (traditional trade, online trading). The COVID-19 impact is also reflected in the number of individual labor agreements suspended or annulled, during this period, with many people entering into furlough or losing their job. At the same time, the recovery time after the previous crisis of 2008 was 6 years for the gross and retail trade overall. In order to reduce the recovery time of the Wholesale and retail—repair of motor vehicles and motorcycles sector as a result of the crisis caused by the COVID-19 virus, the authors propose a series of measures in both the economic and social sector and outline the expected effect as a result of these proposed measures. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.