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- Who gets to make German cars? Volkswagen announced it signed a memorandum of understanding with the Ethiopian Investment Commission to allow Volkswagen to set up operations, including vehicle assembly facilities, in country. Volkswagen, meanwhile, announced it would cut about 500 jobs in Slovakia (that’s about 4 percent of its workforce there). We don’t want to make mountains out of molehills, but the slow reorientation of supply chains – away from both China and Eastern Europe – is the type of slow-moving story that is difficult to follow but monumentally important. Eastern European countries have leveraged their cheap and highly skilled labor to great success, especially in building German products, so their biggest threat lies not in Russia, their historical adversary, but in Germany, which will look for more cost-effective ways to manufacture its goods now that Eastern European wages are rising.
- Geopolitical Futures