More than almost any other functioning industrial site in Britain, Dagenham evokes a nostalgia for the age of mass-production and metal bashing.

ECONOMIST: Industry

What's left--a collection of metal-bashing automotive and aeronautical businesses--has been labeled "the rump" by its critics.

FORBES: Beefing up the rump

What is happening in Pune is more sophisticated than epic feats of metal-bashing.

ECONOMIST: Manufacturing in India

The company owes its name to an early marriage between Welsh heavy industry and Midlands metal-bashing, brokered by Arthur Keen, a Victorian entrepreneur.

ECONOMIST: GKN and aerospace

Its decision to abandon metal-bashing and concentrate on communications, radar and electronic warfare has been rewarded this year with a 40% jump in the share price.

ECONOMIST: European aerospace

It did well shifting from a metal-bashing industrial economy in the 1970s to a high-tech and service economy by the 1990s, just across the river from Manhattan.

ECONOMIST: Everybody suddenly wants to clean up New Jersey

That economy is a mixture of big cattle ranches in the south, family farms in the north, and around Porto Alegre, the capital, locally-owned shoe, wine, chemicals and metal-bashing industries.

ECONOMIST: Brazil