Start-ups are of great importance for economic dynamics and the renewal of the municipal knowledge base. A distinction must be made between commercial and freelance start-ups.
Commercial start-ups are on the rise
The number of business start-ups in Bonn was 3,897 in 2023, a very significant increase of +71.1% compared to the previous year. In NRW as a whole, growth was significantly weaker at +11.1%. At the same time, the number of business deregistrations in Bonn also increased sharply by +59.2%, with a total of exactly 2,599 deregistrations in 2023. The average number of deregistrations in the state of NRW also increased by +7.1% year-on-year. Due to the very large number of business registrations, the balance of net new businesses in Bonn for 2023 is clearly positive at +1,298. This means that the number of net new businesses has roughly doubled over the year (previous year: 644).
Freelance startups
With the study “Freiberufliche Existenzgründungen in Deutschland und seinen Regionen im Jahr 2014”, the Bonn Institute for SME Research (IfM) has comprehensively determined the number of start-ups in the liberal professions for the first time on the basis of data from the tax authorities. Start-up activity in the liberal professions is primarily concentrated in large cities, whereby the IfM researchers assume that these are particularly attractive for start-ups in the liberal professions “...if the local demand for services is stimulated by government or administrative institutions, company headquarters and/or numerous cultural institutions. In addition, local universities and other educational and research institutions generate a large potential workforce for the liberal professions, which tend to have a high affinity for self-employment.”
According to IfM data, 565 start-ups in the liberal professions were registered in the federal city of Bonn in 2023 (2022: 526, 2021: 630, 2020: 585, 2019: 737). This corresponds to 23rd place of all 400 German independent cities and districts (previous year: 24th place). In the Rhine-Sieg district, 729 people took up freelance work.
In relation to the Bonn regional planning region (ROR), which is made up of the city of Bonn and the Rhein-Sieg district, the number of business start-ups in 2023 is 1,294. The figures for the intensity of freelance business start-ups (business start-ups per 10,000 employable inhabitants) in Bonn are
inhabitants) are 26.1 in Bonn and 20.0 in the Rhine-Sieg district. The value for the Bonn regional planning region is 22.3 start-ups per 10,000 employable inhabitants.
Compared to all 96 German regional planning regions, the ROR Bonn has thus risen to 6th place
(previous year: 9th place). This means that ROR Bonn is once again among the 10 regional planning regions with the highest start-up rate in the liberal professions. The leading regions here are Berlin (start-up intensity of 50.2), Hamburg (34.0), Munich (32.4), West Saxony/Leipzig (29.8) and Cologne (27.6).
More bankruptcies
Self-employment rate continues to decline
The self-employment rate records the percentage share of self-employed persons in all employed persons at the place of work. According to the data currently available, the number of self-employed persons in Bonn in 2022 was 15,500 (previous year: 15,700); the number of employed persons was 262,400 (previous year: 256,400). This corresponds to a slightly lower self-employment rate of 5.9% in Bonn compared to the previous year (previous year: 6.1%). It should be noted that the absolute number of self-employed persons fell by 200. At the same time, the total number of people in employment increased by several thousand. The number of employees in 2022 was 247,100; according to the definition of the Federal Statistical Office, this includes blue-collar workers, white-collar workers, civil servants, soldiers and trainees. The self-employment rate for NRW as a whole was 7.8% in 2022, which is also down 0.2 percentage points on the previous year.
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