The Frankfurt Metropolitan Region as a Market Hub

Abstract

Urban marketplaces and their market regions seem to have become topics of the past. The traditional symbiosis of the urban marketplace and its ‘own’ market area has been challenged by many factors, including the following three. First, modern information and communication technologies appear to have made the urban marketplace obsolete, most notably through the new distribution path of e-commerce. The internet serves as a virtual marketplace not only for consumer goods, but increasingly for intermediary products as well (business-to-business, or B2B, solutions). Second, traditional regional markets are being undermined by the integration of national business areas into larger business regions, as well as by the growing interrelation of global business flows. A new business region was created in 1993 with the establishment of the European domestic market, which is the largest in the world in terms of population and economic power. Third, the global division of labor continues to develop, and this results not only in the extension of many value chains through new intermediary production phases, but also in a disproportionate increase in intermediary products and services that can be traded on markets. Virtually all publications on the subject of globalization note that worldwide trade has increased more over the past decades than world production (Dicken, 1998), and that it continues to grow.