When A Factory Stalls

It was an outsourcer's dream. in March, after months of difficult negotiations, Korea's Kia Motors picked the western Slovak town of Zilina as the site of its first plant in Europe. With production set to begin in December 2006, the $1.3 billion deal — the largest foreign investment in Slovakia, the government says, since the fall of the Iron Curtain — would produce a whopping 15,000 jobs nationally (2,800 in the Kia factory, the rest with suppliers) and nearly halve unemployment in the Zilina region. At a press conference announcing the plan, Prime Minister Mikulas Dzurinda lauded the "great success" and...

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