As Japan’s emperor Akihito prepares to abdicate, what’s known as the Heisei period — January 8, 1989, through April 30, 2019 — draws to a close. Those 30 years will forever be associated with the spectacular asset bubble that burst right at the beginning, and the economic lost decade that followed. Heisei was also when Japan’s population peaked and started ...

Every year, BloombergNEF’s advanced transport team builds a bottom-up analysis of the cost of purchasing an electric vehicle (EV) and compares it to cost of a combustion-engine vehicle of same size. The crossover point — when electric vehicles become cheaper than their combustion-engine equivalents — will be a crucial moment for the EV market. All things being equal, upfront price ...

Like the cotton gin and the modern assembly line, 3D printing is the kind of breakthrough advancement that holds the promise to revolutionise manufacturing. The technology lets companies input designs into a printer the size of a small garden shed and have it spit out fully formed, usable products or parts – often at a savings of time, manpower and ...