To witness India’s growing role as a manufacturing hub, dodge Bangalore’s notorious traffic and head north. Around 45km outside the city, amid the dust and debris of construction, Foxconn, a Taiwanese contract manufacturer, is turning 120 hectares of farmland into a factory that will produce around 20m iPhones a year.…

Drive a few hours from Lisbon towards Spain, past the olive farms, and you will arrive at Europe’s largest artificial lake, at the Portuguese town of Alqueva. The first thing that catches the eye is the large hydroelectric dam. But look closer and you will also spot a bright patch…

Sweet and spicy with a sour tinge, sriracha sauce was an instant hit when David Tran, a Vietnamese refugee, brought it to America in the 1980s under the brand Huy Fong Foods. Asian eateries were the first to snap up Mr Tran’s hot sauce, but before long the green-nozzled bottle,…

Lufthansa and IAG are pursuing big acquisitions

Chart: The Economist On June 18th Nvidia overtook Microsoft as the world’s most valuable company. Its market capitalisation of $3.3trn is more than 20 times what it was in January 2020. Investors are buying its shares as greedily as tech giants are buying its artificial-intelligence chips. Nvidia’s revenue in the…

If there is one thing politicians agree on these days, it is that manufacturing jobs are “good” jobs. Joe Biden is betting that huge subsidies for new factories will transform the outlook for America’s workers—and November’s election. His acting labour secretary recently embarked on a jolly-sounding “Good Jobs Summer Tour”…

In a factory in a smoggy corner of China’s inland Shaanxi province, the country’s world-leading solar industry is on display. Robots scoot around carrying square slices of polysilicon, a crystalline substance usually made from quartz. The slices, each 180mm across and a hair’s breadth thick, are called wafers. They are…

HOW MUCH is one-party rule worth to India Inc? Judging by the market reaction to the results of the general election, the figure is around $400bn. That is the total market value lost by Mumbai-listed stocks on June 4th, when it turned out that rather than securing a big majority,…

WHEN A GAGGLE of Generation-Z employees from Seoul, Shanghai, Singapore and Tokyo gets together in one place, the ensuing conversation will usually be conducted in decent English. The participants are all equally fluent in another common language—that of corporate despair. The inflexible hierarchies, long hours and culture of presenteeism that…

When the Alternative for Germany (AfD, from its German initials) was launched in 2013, it was a pro-business, classically liberal party created by German intellectuals opposed to the single European currency. Hans-Olaf Henkel, a free-market enthusiast and former boss of the bDI, the main German industry association, was a founding…