Prof. Dr. Carla Krolage

Retail sales in German city centers remain below pre-pandemic levels, finds a recent study conducted by the ifo Institute for the Berlin, Munich, Hamburg, Stuttgart, and Dresden areas. “In March 2023, private spending in the city center was still 5% lower than in 2019. At the same time, residential areas and suburbs recorded strong gains in sales,” said Oliver Falck of the ifo Institute. Consumer spending rose by up to 30%, particularly in areas where many people could work from home. 

Since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, the proportion of companies founded by women has fallen most steeply in rural areas. Women were already founding less than 20 percent of all new companies prior to the pandemic, and Germany’s commercial register shows that this figure dropped to 16 percent in 2021. This is the finding of a new ifo study.

The coronavirus pandemic has shifted consumption from city centers to city outskirts – with ongoing impact. At the end of May 2022, sales in five German consumption centers in downtown urban areas were still 10 percent below pre-crisis levels, but sales increased by up to 20 percent in the outlying suburbs. This is the core finding of an ifo Institute study, based on aggregated and anonymized retail sales data provided by Mastercard.