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Old Posted Aug 12, 2014, 10:20 AM
Miu Miu is offline
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Join Date: Apr 2004
Location: UK
Posts: 446
Quote:
Originally Posted by New Brisavoine View Post

In general, I would say that Germany tends to be a homogenous country (small rural Bavarian or Wurttemburgian districts are as productive and wealthy as big cities), whereas France is more a country of big contrasts, a bit like the US, with very productive and wealthy large cities, and rather unproductive and less well-off rural areas. Of course the big difference with the US is the huge regional equalization in France. Thanks to redistribution by the French state, you don't really notice the sharp differences on the ground, because money from the big cities is pumped to fund the rural areas. It's not like you're going to see potholes on the roads in Creuse or Cantal, even though their headline GDP per capita is as low as the Italian Mezzogiorno. In fact the roads and public equipments would tend to be in better shape in the rural areas with low GDP per capita, because the French state has always had a tendency to favor disproportionately the rural areas, to the detriment of the big cities which sorely need investment (the northern districts of Marseille or the northern banlieues of Paris come to mind).
France is extremely homogeneous outside of Paris as far as GDP is concernced, much more so than Germany, as a quick look at NUTS 2-level data confirms.
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