BRUSSELS — When European finance ministers agreed on a half-trillion euros’ worth of joint measures to shore up their economies in the face of the coronavirus, it felt like an accomplishment. But two weeks later, when European Union leaders met to approve that package, the deal already looked like too little, too late.

While the leaders of the 27 member nations did approve the aid package in a teleconference on Thursday night, they also shifted their attention to what more still needs to be done, asking the bloc’s executive arm to come up with a proposal for a recovery fund from what is set to be an economic calamity unseen on the continent outside wartime.

But what that fund will do, how big it will be, when it will be introduced — and virtually every other detail pertaining to its function — is still to be determined, and those gaping blanks lay bare just how far away the bloc’s leaders are from agreeing on a bolder joint effort.

A recovery experienced evenly across the 27 member nations — population 440 million, wealth $20 trillion, forecast recession this year 10 percent — is crucial for the European Union to continue functioning as a single market for goods and services, its main purpose. It is also crucial to the stability of one of the world’s most important currencies, the euro, which is shared by 19 European Union countries.