We really haven't the data for a meaningful quantitative comparison: estimates for the 16th century are largely conjectural, for Rome doubly so. The same goes for trade, with just a few indicators for particular products and places. One very big difference is that Rome and its sphere were Mediterranean, later Europe only partly so. Britain was no longer a colonial granary, Germany no longer peripheral, even remoter Baltic lands now a part of a growing northern trade network that may already have eclipsed the Mediterranean. Similarly there's no longer a Rome, drawing tribute from all it surveys: instead the west's biggest cities can only muster 200,000 inhabitants at the start of the modern era, and each has to fend for itself except perhaps Paris with its overspill from royal administration. And lastly there's a radically different social order, no longer using 5-10 million slaves, though other forms of exploitation and disadvantage persist.

I would put the later period ahead on grounds of population growth and more diversified production, trade and consumption: a few centuries earlier that might not be the case. But after the 1490s ocean routes to the Americas and India transformed western Europe immeasurably, even if the Mediterranean largely missed out.