Special reports

The cheap-and-cheerful end of the marketWHEN in 1999 Renault spent $50m to acquire a controlling stake in Dacia, a sickly Romanian carmaker formerly owned by the state, it was unimaginable that it ...

The question is not whether the world can cope with three billion cars—but howUNTIL recently the biannual Beijing motor show was a bit of a backwater, a place where Chinese makers displayed their c...

Emerging markets are the car industry’s big hope. But it won’t be an easy ride, says Matthew Symonds (interviewed here)THERE has rarely been a tougher time to be a carmaker. Squeezed by the credit ...

Cheaper than four wheels, better than two feetTHE morning rush hour in the southern Indian city of Chennai (formerly Madras) is much like those in other big South Asian towns. A throng of mostly sm...

To succeed in emerging markets, rich-country carmakers have to tailor their strategiesTHE carmakers that have so far done best from the emerging-market boom are the ones that placed their manufactu...

Indigenous carmakers are working their way upRATAN TATA may be the patriarch of Indian business and head of the sprawling conglomerate that bears the family name, but few doubt that his first love ...

An already solid financial system faces more consolidationON THE outskirts of every Spanish city and town, and even some villages, you will see neat rows of houses or blocks of flats in various sta...

Devolution has been good for Spain, but it may have gone too farTHE hardest problem for the authors of Spain’s democratic constitution was to strike a balance between the central government and the...

But reforming the old one is just as importantDOWN on the Barcelona waterfront, on what used to be industrial wasteland before the area was developed for the 1992 Olympic games, a striking new buil...

Attitudes to immigration are turning more cautiousFOR much of the Middle Ages, after the invasion of Muslim Berbers and Arabs in the eighth century, Spain was a multicultural country. Several Chris...