What carries a region economically

A large project can come — and leave again. What remains is the dense web of family businesses, crafts and suppliers that carries a region across generations. It makes no headline, but it holds the economy together.

To strengthen a region, one should therefore look at that web first — not at the one name that draws attention.

Every sound business that closes for lack of a successor tears a gap in the web — jobs, knowledge, purchasing power. These gaps add up quietly, until a region grows noticeably thinner.

Securing succession is therefore not only a matter for individual families, but one of the most important regional tasks there is.

The scale can be stated. According to the statistics of the Institut für Mittelstandsforschung Bonn, more than 3.4 million companies in Germany count as small or medium-sized — over 99 per cent of all private-sector enterprises. They employ around 19.1 million people, of whom some 16.1 million are in socially insured employment: rather more than half of all socially insured employees in Germany.

In training, the share is starker still: businesses with fewer than 250 socially insured employees account for more than 71 per cent of all apprentices. Anyone learning a trade in Germany is very likely learning it in a small firm.

One figure breaks the pattern, and it is the most interesting one: of all taxable turnover in 2023, these companies accounted for just 28.0 per cent. Over 99 per cent of companies, a good half of employment, three in four training places — but less than a third of turnover.

That is exactly the point. Judge a region by turnover and you see the big names. Judge it by work, training and reasons to stay and you see the network. Both are true figures about the same economy; they simply answer different questions. For the question of what carries a region, turnover is the wrong one.

People stay where work, culture and belonging come together. Take one of them away, and they move on — and with them the substance.

A strong region therefore thinks of businesses, culture and people together, instead of managing them in separate departments.

Institut für Mittelstandsforschung Bonn, statistics on enterprise stock, employment and turnover, reference year 2023. The shares in this section come from there. Available at ifm-bonn.org.

Two qualifications belong with them: the figures follow the European Commission's SME definition and do not fully coincide with what is colloquially called the Mittelstand — the IfM itself notes that SMEs are only part of it. And the apprenticeship share refers to businesses below 250 socially insured employees, a size threshold rather than precisely the same definition.

All values are national. They cannot be scaled down to a single region — they describe a pattern, not a place.