Editing Erfurt (section)

=== Agriculture, industry and services ===
[[File:Optima-Werk Erfurt.JPG|thumb|Former factory building, now reused for services.]]
[[File:Anger 1 Erfurt Kaufhaus Römischer Kaiser 686-vLh.jpg|thumb|''Anger 1'', a big department store in centre.]]

Farming has a great tradition in Erfurt: the cultivation of [[Isatis tinctoria|woad]] made the city rich during the Middle Ages. Today, horticulture and the production of flower seeds is still an important business in Erfurt. There is also growing of fruits (like apples, strawberries and sweet cherries), vegetables (e.g. cauliflowers, potatoes, cabbage and sugar beets) and grain on more than 60% of the municipal territory.<ref name=":0" />

Industrialization in Erfurt started around 1850. Until World War I, many factories were founded in different sectors like engine building, shoes, guns, malt and later electro-technics, so that there was no industrial monoculture in the city. After 1945, the companies were nationalized by the [[East Germany|GDR]] government, which led to the decline of some of them. After reunification, nearly all factories were closed, either because they failed to successfully adopt to a free market economy or because the German government sold them to west German businessmen who closed them to avoid competition to their own enterprises.{{citation needed|date=July 2014}} However, in the early 1990s the federal government started to subsidize the foundation of new companies. It still took a long time before the economic situation stabilized around 2006. Since this time, unemployment has decreased and overall, new jobs were created. Today, there are many small and medium-sized companies in Erfurt with electro-technics, semiconductors and photovoltaics in focus. Engine production, food production, the [[Braugold]] brewery, and [[Born Feinkost]], a producer of Thuringian mustard, remain important industries.{{Citation needed|date=September 2023}}

Erfurt is an ''{{lang|de|Oberzentrum}}'' (which means "supra-centre" according to [[Central place theory]]) in German regional planning. Such centres are always hubs of service businesses and public services like hospitals, universities, research, trade fairs, retail etc. Additionally, Erfurt is the capital of the federal state of Thuringia, so that there are many institutions of administration like all the Thuringian state ministries and some nationwide authorities. Typical for Erfurt are the logistic business with many distribution centres of big companies, the [[Erfurt Trade Fair]] and the media sector with [[KiKa]] and [[Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk|MDR]] as public broadcast stations. A growing industry is tourism, due to the various historical sights of Erfurt. There are 4,800 hotel beds and (in 2012) 450,000 overnight visitors spent a total of 700,000 nights in hotels. Nevertheless, most tourists are one-day visitors from Germany. The Christmas Market in December attracts some 2,000,000 visitors each year.<ref>{{Cite web |title=The official Erfurt Christmas Market Portal |url=https://weihnachtsmarkt.erfurt.de/wm/en/index.html |access-date=2024-05-11 |website=Erfurter Weihnachtsmarkt |language=en}}</ref>