Though the weather attracts skiers, around which a tourist industry has been built, there are no other large, growing industries to provide work: less than 2% of Japan's manufacturing industry is based in Hokkaido.

ECONOMIST: The first of an occasional series on Japan��s economic pains

TBM, a manufacturing consultancy based in North Carolina, it is the truck industry that is successfully showing how to disintegrate car manufacturing.

ECONOMIST: Car manufacturing

Our calculations are based on the value-added in industry (which extends beyond manufacturing) and the wage bill of urban factories, which does not count the town and village enterprises that employ over two-thirds of China's metal-bashers.

ECONOMIST: The yuan-dollar exchange rate

One of the world's most conspicuously successful centres of enterprise lies in that bit of California known as Silicon Valley: computing is today's knowledge-based industry par excellence (see survey) The new jobs in tomorrow's industries, in manufacturing and services alike, will call for more than button-pressing automatons.

ECONOMIST: Education and the wealth of nations | The