La répartition des hommes, des activités et des richesses sur le territoire national

The big cities, and especially the biggest of them -the urban area of Paris- attract more and more people, economic activities and wealth. The inhabitants frequently settle a few miles away from the center of the city. Thus, they hope to benefit from an urban way of life in the countryside, but jobs still remain in the city, and continue to disappear from rural areas. The regions which include the biggest towns (Paris, Lyons, Marseilles) are those sharing the strongest growth in population and employment. The concentration of people in the Ile- de-France is rather an old story dating back, more than a century now. The relative stabilization of population levels in this region for thirty years has been the result of two movements : a huge flow of young people coming from their regions to find a job, and an important flow of elderly people going back to these regions, when they retire. These two population flows are almost equal in size; but they create a demographic and economic dynamism favourable to the Ile-de-France. The mechanism of the demographic growth of the Rhône-Alpes and the ProvenceAlpes-Côte-d'Azur regions is rather different. These three regions account for a large share of the production of wealth in France. The redistribution of this wealth is made through a complex system of transferts, working mainly in favour of the rural areas or of those regions who suffer from economic problems. Thus available household income is slightly less unequally distributed than domestic product.