For international real estate investors, the main draw in a country is usually its capital city — this is where the powerful machinery of both government and business is located, and where the long-term, creditworthy tenants of prime office properties are based. A recent study from the Cologne Institute for Economic Research (Institut der deutschen Wirtschaft Köln eV) has shown the economic impact that a capital city can have on a country, and has also revealed what can happen when a capital city is not that country’s dominant city and contributor to the economy.

Learning that Greece without Athens, for example, would see GDP per capita there fall by 19.8 percent is not so much of a surprise, for what is Greece without Athens? Similarly for Slovakia without Bratislava, an 18.9 percent fall in GDP per capita.

It is well known that — unlike France, with Paris, and the United Kingdom, with London — decentralised Germany features seven major real