Startups in the country and factories in the city?

Can we set up startups in rural areas? Factories in metropolitan France?

Sharing data prepared for a regional symposium, or a little insight into our methodology for answering these questions.

We began by grouping French employment zones into 5 categories, from "Rank 1" (8 employment zones accounting for 30% of the French employed population), to "Rank 5", with 147 zones accounting for 10% of French employment. The question is complex, but at first glance, we can say that Rank 1 zones tend to be metropolises, and Rank 5 zones rural areas.

We then analyzed the distribution of job creations by zone, in the Trendeo database, for each of the types of activity defined in our database(https://lnkd.in/dz9x7Ks). The aim is to measure the over- or under-representation of each type of activity in each zone.

The method is simple: rank 1 zones are home to 30% of jobs in France, but, according to Trendeo data, they were home to 52% of the service jobs created between 2009 and 2021. Hence an over-representation of 74% of these jobs (first box in the second table below).

Some thoughts on the overall results:

• Service activities, digital activities, head office and headquarters activities, R&D, are clearly metropolitan and increasingly under-represented in smaller areas (with a different intensity, digital activities being the most metropolitan).
• On the other hand, the smaller the employment zone, the more industrial activities are over-represented, again in a very linear fashion. The situation is similar for agricultural production.
• Sales outlets are fairly evenly distributed, except in the smallest areas.
• Other activities have a less linear distribution: logistics, for example, where platforms avoid both metropolises and very rural areas, concentrating on hubs close to medium-sized towns. The same is probably true of data centers, which are also infrastructures.

Part of what we call the metropolization of activities comes from the growth of digital activities, for example, not from an intrinsic superiority of metropolises for all types of activity. If industrial investment picks up again, there could be a rebalancing.

This also means that first-tier metropolises should probably not try to position themselves to attract industrial investment - except in special cases. On the other hand, medium-sized towns and rural areas can benefit from the upturn in industrial employment.

These few rough conclusions deserve confirmation and zone-by-zone analysis, which our users can do for themselves!

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