This fascinating post, part of a series on Chinese manufacturing that’s been picked up by BoingBoing, seems to be missing one very significant point. Yes, it’s all very cool; precision-machining billets of cold steel into incredibly perfect moulds that will be used to injection-mould the Chumby, blasting off the rough edges with an electron gun, [...]

It is by now well known that the main hope for developed societies subject to rapid population ageing who wish to maintain their relative standard of living lies in increasing their collective productivity more rapidly than they increase their dependency ratio via-a-vis the older age groups. Now in the comments thread on the recent ‘Reform [...]

There is not much market for reviews of books published almost a decade and a half ago, so without further ado, my thoughts on The Prize, by Daniel Yergin. This evaluation is overdue because I started reading the book when I bought it, back in 1997. I put it down around page 400 (which is [...]

Well just in case the Iranian situation wasn’t difficult enough in and of itself (or here), there are always some around who will seek to take short-term benefit from the temporary embarassment of others. So this week, as June delivery oil prices spiked up around the 74 dollar a barrel mark, it became just [...]

News today which is of more than passing interest from the Czech Republic. The South Korean industrial group Hyundai has announced that it is going to build its first European car plant at Nosovice. The factory - which is scheduled to cost around one billion euros - should begin production in October [...]

So, President Basescu is unhappy.
This is not unusual. President Basescu is often unhappy. You’d think that, having won the election last December against Prime Minister Nastase, he’d be at least content. But Basescu is a scrapper, and he’s always looking for a fight, and in recent weeks he’s found one. It’s [...]

I can’t help feeling that no sooner do I lift someone up than I find I have to knock him down again. I ended the last post offering a best case scenario excuse for Jacques Chirac, but now another topic lands on my in-tray: France and strategic industries.

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BusinessWeek spills a lot of ink on the rise of the car industry in Central and Eastern Europe. The idea that a lot of manufacturing is headed east is nothing new, but to see the numbers and changes laid out so explicitly gives a much clearer idea of the challenges that Western societies are facing.
Volkswagen [...]

China is getting into car manufacture in a big way, but before going further with this, let me sidetrack you to another article in today’s FT. Here you will find two interesting details. Firstly, according to Arthur Kroeber, of China Economic Quarterly, ?Since 2003, China has gone from being a net importer of capital [...]

It should be noted that Germany is not the only EU member state where controversy is growing about economic stagnation and what to do about it. Luca Cordero di Montezemolo, the chairman of Confindustria, Italy’s employers’ group, has made his preferences clear: ?I don’t want an Italy like Disneyworld”.

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