It’s difficult to compare though, because of other factors. I believe the main one between countries like France and Italy and Germany is actually the Euro currency. It’s generally considered to be overvalued compared to France and Italy’s economies and undervalued compared to Germany’s. This makes Germany’s exports extremely competitive (at the expense of costlier imports) which has spurred on their ability to build up a huge manufacturing sector and run a massive trade surplus. France and Italy, on the other hand, enjoy cheaper imports at the expense of less competitive export industries, and unsurprisingly have a trade deficit. Differences in inflation rate, etc. between the Eurozone countries which might otherwise be balanced out by flexible exchange rates can’t be. Instead you get ‘internal devaluation’ which often means higher unemployment.

How federal systems get around this (like how all the states in the US using the same currency) is having the Federal Government tax and spend which can balance a lot of that out. Europe doesn’t have that, but eventually will have to or split back into individual currencies.

I believe this is also why gold standard systems have always failed eventually too - they require fixed exchange rates and even with rebalancing every now and then you can’t be as effective as a floating exchange rate.