MUCH LIKE GERMANY’S economy, Bonn’s central station and its immediate surroundings have seen better days. So too has the small building squeezed between a travel agent and a bio-supermarket on Maximilianstrasse, a stone’s throw from the station. As well as housing a language school, these premises are the surprisingly modest headquarters of the Institut für Mittelstandsforschung (IFM). Funded chiefly by the federal and North Rhine-Westphalia governments, the IFM has since 1957 been the principal source of research on Germany’s celebrated Mittelstand, the mass of small and medium-sized companies frequently described as being the backbone of Europe’s largest economy.
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