Development

Cambridge IGCSE Geography 0460 · Paper 2 Human Geography Syllabus: 2027, 2028 and 2029 Official syllabus points: 8.1.1 to 8.3.4

Topic 8 is one of the five human topics examined on Paper 2. Paper 2 lasts 1 hour 45 minutes, is worth 75 marks and contains two sections. Section A is one compulsory structured question worth 25 marks. Section B offers three structured questions of 25 marks each and you answer two of them. Every topic from 6 to 10 can appear.

This topic carries more statistics than any other. That is an advantage, because the examiner cannot easily invent a mark scheme point you have not met, and a disadvantage, because a candidate who writes "LICs are poor and HICs are rich" for seven marks will score at the bottom of Level 1. The mark schemes on this topic reward two things above all: a correct mechanism, meaning the chain of reasoning from cause to effect, and place specific detail, meaning real country names with real figures and real dates. Levelled questions in this board are routinely capped with the instruction "Max 5 if no named or inappropriate example", so a correct but placeless answer loses two marks by rule before the examiner has judged the geography at all.

1. The terminology Cambridge uses, and why it changed

Read this section before anything else, because it is the single most likely place to lose easy marks in 2027.

The 2027 syllabus states its own preferred terminology in the Paper 2 introduction:

One form of terminology used to refer to countries at different levels of development is low-income countries (LICs), middle-income countries (MICs) and high-income countries (HICs). We will use these categories to give context to examples in question papers.

So the question papers you sit will say LIC, MIC and HIC. Older textbooks, and every past paper mark scheme published before 2027, use LEDC (less economically developed country), MEDC (more economically developed country) and NIC (newly industrialised country). Those older terms are not wrong geography, but they are not the wording of the current papers, and a resource that mixes both will confuse you under exam pressure.

What to do in the exam. Use LIC, MIC and HIC. If a question or a figure gives you a different label, use the label the question gives you. Never invent a category that Cambridge does not use, such as "third world" or "underdeveloped".

The syllabus also attaches an important caution to its own categories:

At Cambridge we recognise that categorising countries is not always meaningful, and a country can sometimes fall into different categories depending on the types of measures being considered.

That sentence is a free evaluation point and it is worth learning as a sentence. A country can be classed as a middle-income country on an income measure and rank far lower on a composite socio-economic index, or the reverse. Whenever a question asks you to evaluate the usefulness of a grouping or an indicator, the fact that the classification depends on the measure chosen is a valid and creditable point.

2. What development means

Development is the use of resources and technology to raise the standard of living and quality of life of a population.

Two ideas sit inside that definition and the syllabus separates them at point 8.1.3.

• Economic development concerns wealth, income, production and employment. It is measured in money.
• Social development concerns health, education, housing, rights and services. It is not measured in money, although money helps to buy it.

A country can move on one and not the other, and the whole of section 4 below rests on that fact.

Exam trap: development is not the same as growth. Economic growth means output rising. Development means the benefits of that output reaching people. An oil economy whose output doubles while its infant mortality rate does not fall has grown without developing, and Cambridge examiners like that distinction.

3. Social and economic indicators of development (8.1.1)

Syllabus point 8.1.1 names nine indicators as examples. Because they are named, the examiner may ask you to define any one of them, to read one from a table or a map, or to explain why it shows the level of development of a country. Learn all nine as definitions.

GNP, GDP and GNI, and why the difference matters

These three are constantly confused, and the mark schemes accept them almost interchangeably, but the definitions are separable and a definition question wants the right one.

• GDP is about place. Everything produced within the borders counts, including output of a foreign owned factory.
• GNP and GNI are about ownership and residence. Earnings sent home from citizens working abroad count in, and profits sent out of the country by a foreign owned firm count out.

1. a transnational corporation builds a factory in an MIC
2. the output raises that country's GDP
3. the profits are sent back to the parent company's home country
4. the MIC's GNI rises by much less than its GDP.

That single chain explains why a country hosting a great deal of foreign owned industry can look richer on GDP than its people actually are. It is also the reason the World Bank classifies countries on GNI rather than GDP.

Exam trap: always say per capita or per person if that is what the figure is. Total GNP is meaningless as a development indicator, because a large poor country can have a larger total GNP than a small rich one. A 2021 mark scheme credits exactly this point: HDI "is not affected by population size unlike total GNP".

The Human Development Index in detail

The HDI is the composite index the examiner asks about most often. It combines three dimensions:

1. A long and healthy life, measured by life expectancy at birth.
2. Knowledge, measured by expected years of schooling for a child entering school and mean years of schooling for adults.
3. A decent standard of living, measured by GNI per capita, adjusted for what money actually buys in that country.

The three are combined into a single value on a scale from 0 to 1, where 1 is the theoretical maximum. In the data for 2022, published by the United Nations Development Programme, Switzerland stood at the top with an HDI of about 0.967 and Somalia at the bottom with about 0.380, against a world average of about 0.739.

Learn the three dimensions, not the arithmetic. No 0460 question asks you to calculate an HDI. Several ask you to state which indicators it uses, and one 2020 paper set that as a tick box question for three marks.

A warning about older mark schemes. Past paper mark schemes on this topic do not agree with each other about the income component of the HDI. A 2020 mark scheme correctly lists "Gross National Income (GNI) per person, life expectancy, number of years of schooling". A 2021 mark scheme lists "GNP (per capita), allow GNI/GDP". The index has used GNI per capita since 2010. Write GNI, and you are safe against both.

4. Using indicators to compare countries, and evaluating their usefulness (8.1.2)

This is the point that produces the hardest questions on the topic, because it asks you to be sceptical about the very numbers you have just learned.

4.1 Why single indicators are used

A single indicator is easy to collect, easy to publish, easy to compare and easy to plot. Most of the data questions on this paper give you two indicators and a scatter graph and ask you to describe the relationship.

The relationships you are expected to know:

1. higher national income
2. government has more tax revenue
3. more spending on clinics, vaccination, piped water and sanitation
4. fewer babies die of preventable infection
5. infant mortality rate falls.

How to answer a "describe the relationship" question. Mark schemes on this board award, in this order: the direction of the relationship, a statement of the exception or anomaly, and statistics from two contrasting points to support it. A 2020 mark scheme is explicit that statistics need "two sets", one country at each end, and that the units must be quoted. A 2022 mark scheme awards a mark for saying the relationship "is not perfect" and then naming the anomalous point.

4.2 Why single indicators are unreliable

Learn these six limitations. Every "evaluate the usefulness of indicators" question is answered from this list.

1. An average hides distribution. GNI per capita is a mean. If a small elite holds most of the income, the average tells you nothing about the typical person. A country can have a respectable GNI per capita and widespread poverty at the same time.
2. An average hides regional variation inside a country. India's national figures conceal the gap between states. At the 2011 Census, Kerala recorded a literacy rate of 94.0% while Bihar recorded 61.8%. A 2021 Cambridge paper set exactly this question using a map of HDI by Nigerian state.
3. Money is not welfare. A high income earned in a polluted, unsafe or unequal society does not deliver a good life. The mark schemes state it plainly: "a high income does not always mean a high quality of life".
4. Currency comparison is unstable. Incomes converted at market exchange rates are not directly comparable, because the same amount of money buys different quantities in different countries, and because exchange rates and inflation both move. This is why HDI's 0 to 1 scale is praised in the mark schemes for enabling comparison.
5. Data quality varies. Poorer countries have weaker statistical services. Subsistence farming, informal work and unregistered births are undercounted, so the recorded figures may understate both output and population.
6. One indicator measures one thing. Calorie intake tells you about food quantity and nothing about diet quality. Doctors per person tells you the number of doctors and nothing about whether they are in the rural areas where they are needed.

4.3 Why a composite index is better, and where it still fails

A 2021 mark scheme lists the advantages of HDI over GNP almost exactly as follows, and these are the marks:

• HDI is a composite indicator, so it covers social factors as well as economic ones.
• It includes education, which reflects literacy and skills.
• It includes life expectancy, which reflects the health of the population.
• Its scores run on a comparable 0 to 1 scale for every country.
• It is not distorted by population size in the way total GNP is.
• It can be used to show change over time and is not affected by inflation.

But HDI is still an average, so it still hides inequality inside a country, and it still leaves out things people value: political freedom, safety, gender equality, environmental quality and access to housing. Naming one omission is a reliable evaluation mark.

4.4 The anomaly argument, which is the top of the ladder

The strongest evaluation move is to name a country where the income measure and the social measure disagree, because that proves the point rather than asserting it.

• Equatorial Guinea earns a high income per person from offshore oil, but in the 2022 data its HDI was about 0.650, far below other countries at its income level, and its life expectancy was around 61 years. Income was not converted into health and education.
• Costa Rica does the reverse. It abolished its armed forces in 1948 and redirected spending into health and education. In the 2022 data its life expectancy was about 80.8 years and its HDI about 0.806, ahead of several countries with higher incomes.
• Cuba has roughly 8.4 doctors per 1,000 people, one of the highest ratios in the world, on a modest national income.

1. oil revenue flows to a small elite and to foreign shareholders
2. little is spent on clinics and schools
3. income per person rises but life expectancy and schooling do not
4. GNI per capita overstates the level of development.

5. Factors affecting quality of life and standard of living (8.1.3)

This point is new for the 2027 syllabus as a separate, examinable heading. It was implied by the older syllabus but never listed, so there is little direct past paper evidence for it.

Standard of living refers to the material goods and services a person can obtain: income, food, housing, possessions, energy supply. It can largely be measured in money.

Quality of life is broader. It refers to a person's overall wellbeing, including the material things but also health, safety, education, environment, freedom and social relationships. It cannot be reduced to a single number.

A worked distinction: a person whose income doubles has a higher standard of living. If that income came from working eighteen hour days in a polluted city away from their family, their quality of life may not have improved at all.

Factors affecting both

Cambridge has examined quality of life through squatter settlements repeatedly. A 2021 Paper 4 mark scheme scores it entirely through building material, water source, electricity source and legal tenure, and a 2024 Paper 2 question asked candidates to compare the quality of life in two squatter settlements from photographs. If you get a photograph, read those four things off it.

1. a household gains legal tenure of its plot
2. it is safe from eviction
3. it is willing to invest in a permanent brick house and a water connection
4. health improves and the property becomes an asset
5. quality of life rises without any rise in wage income.

6. Reasons for differences in levels of development and the development gap (8.2.1)

The development gap is the difference in wealth and wellbeing between the richest and the poorest countries, and between the richest and poorest people within a country.

The syllabus requires social, economic and environmental factors, so structure your answer under those three headings. The 2021 mark scheme for "explain why there are inequalities in wealth between countries" awards five marks from a list that maps onto them almost exactly.

6.1 Environmental and physical factors

• Natural resources. A country with oil, gas, coal, metal ores or diamonds has something to export. A country without them must buy energy and raw materials.
• Climate and water. Reliable rainfall supports agriculture. Drought, unreliable rainfall and desertification suppress yields and force spending on food imports and relief.
• Soil fertility. Fertile alluvial soils support high yields; leached, thin or salinised soils do not.
• Relief and land quality. Steep, mountainous or swampy land is hard to farm, hard to build on and expensive to cross with roads.
• Landlocked or coastal. A landlocked country must pay a neighbour to move its exports to a port, which raises the cost of everything it sells. The mark scheme lists "whether country is landlocked or coastal" as a creditable point in its own right. In Africa, the countries with the lowest HDI values are disproportionately landlocked.
• Natural hazards. Repeated tropical cyclones, floods, droughts or earthquakes destroy infrastructure faster than it can be replaced, and divert spending from development to reconstruction.
• Disease environment. Malaria, and historically sleeping sickness, reduce the working population's health and productivity in the tropics.

6.2 Economic factors

• Employment structure. A country whose workforce is mostly in primary activity, especially subsistence agriculture, generates little income per worker. Manufacturing and services generate far more value per worker.
• Trade and the terms of trade. Countries that export primary products (cocoa, coffee, copper, cotton, crude oil) and import manufactured goods are exposed twice: primary product prices are volatile and have tended to rise more slowly than the prices of manufactured goods, and the value added by processing happens elsewhere.
• Dependence on a single export. Nigeria has long depended on crude oil for roughly nine tenths of its export earnings, so a fall in the world oil price becomes a national budget crisis.
• Debt. Money spent servicing external debt cannot be spent on schools and clinics.
• Investment and technology. Capital allows mechanisation, irrigation, fertiliser and transport. Without it, productivity stays low, incomes stay low, and there is nothing left to invest. This is the cycle of poverty.
• Accessibility. Roads, railways, ports and reliable electricity determine whether production can reach a market at all.

1. low incomes
2. little saving
3. little money available for investment in schools, machinery or roads
4. productivity stays low
5. output stays low
6. incomes stay low.

6.3 Social and political factors

• Education and skills. Low literacy limits the range of work people can do and slows the adoption of technology. Educating girls has a measurable effect on birth rates, infant mortality and household income.
• Health. A population weakened by malnutrition or disease works fewer days and dies younger, so the return on education is lost.
• Population growth. Where the birth rate is high, extra output must be shared between more people, so income per person can stagnate while total output rises.
• Government and corruption. Stable government that collects tax and spends it on infrastructure and services raises development. The mark scheme lists "government/corruption" as a single creditable point.
• Conflict. Civil war destroys infrastructure, displaces farmers from their land, deters investment and closes schools.
• Colonial history. The mark schemes credit "historical development/impact of colonialism". Colonial economies were often built to extract one raw material and move it to a port, which left transport networks pointing at the coast rather than linking the country together, and left an economy dependent on a single export.

6.4 Inequality within a country

The syllabus wording covers gaps within as well as between countries, and Cambridge has examined inequality inside urban areas at seven marks. Reasons include:

• Uneven distribution of resources between regions, as with Nigeria's oil producing Niger Delta states.
• Core and periphery. Investment concentrates in the capital and the largest port, drawing in migrants and capital and leaving remote rural areas without services.
• Access to education, which is worse in rural areas and worse for girls in some societies, and which then determines lifetime earnings.
• Formal and informal employment. Informal workers have no contract, no sick pay and no pension.
• Land ownership and tenure, which determines who can borrow and who can invest.
• Discrimination by gender, ethnicity or caste, which closes off occupations.

7. The current global pattern of LICs, MICs and HICs (8.2.2)

This point is new for 2027 in this wording. The older syllabus asked for inequalities between and within countries but did not require the income group classification or its global pattern.

7.1 How the classification is made

The World Bank sorts every economy into four income groups using GNI per capita, calculated by the Atlas method, and revises the thresholds each year. For the classification published in July 2024, using 2023 data, the bands were:

The two middle bands together are the middle-income countries (MICs). Quote the year with the thresholds, because they move every July.

7.2 The pattern to describe

If you are given a world map of income groups, describe it the way the mark schemes reward: by continent and region, then by latitude or hemisphere, then with an exception.

• HICs are concentrated in North America, western and northern Europe, Australia and New Zealand, Japan and South Korea, and the oil states of the Arabian Peninsula. Most lie in the northern hemisphere and in the middle latitudes.
• MICs cover most of Latin America, North Africa, South East Asia, China, India and much of eastern Europe. This is the largest group by population by a wide margin.
• LICs are overwhelmingly in sub-Saharan Africa, with a small number in South Asia and in countries affected by long conflicts such as Afghanistan, Syria and Yemen.
• The obvious exception is the Arabian Peninsula, a group of HICs at low latitudes in a region otherwise dominated by MICs, because of oil and gas.

A 2021 mark scheme for a map of HDI in Africa awards marks for exactly this kind of statement: "lowest are mostly landlocked but highest are mainly coastal", "highest are at higher latitudes", "highest are in north or south but lowest are in between".

Exam technique: a description question wants the pattern, not the reasons. If the question says "describe the distribution", do not explain it. If it says "suggest reasons for the distribution", use section 6.

7.3 The pattern is not static

The gap has not stayed still. China's economy moved from low income to upper middle income within a generation, and the World Bank estimates that around 800 million people there were lifted out of extreme poverty after reforms began in 1978. Several Asian economies followed the same path through manufacturing for export. Most sub-Saharan African LICs did not. Saying that "the development gap is widening" without qualification is therefore risky; the gap between HICs and the fastest growing MICs has narrowed, while the gap between HICs and the poorest LICs has not.

8. Sustainable development (8.3.1)

Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.

That is the definition from the Brundtland Commission report Our Common Future, published in 1987, and it is the definition to reproduce. A two mark question splits it exactly where the sentence splits, and the mark scheme confirms it:

• one mark for meeting the needs of the present, or allowing development now;
• one mark for without compromising the needs of the future, or not using up the resources future generations will need.

The same mark scheme accepts an alternative pairing worth learning as a backup: achieving economic development and maintaining or improving quality of life, while not damaging the environment.

The three pillars

Sustainable development is usually drawn as three overlapping strands, and the syllabus uses the same three words at 8.3.2:

• Economic: the activity must earn enough to continue without permanent subsidy.
• Social: it must improve people's quality of life and involve the local community.
• Environmental: it must not degrade the resource base it depends on.

A strategy that fails any one of the three is not sustainable. That test is the fastest way to structure an evaluation.

Context: the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, seventeen goals adopted in 2015 with a target date of 2030, are the framework most governments now use. Goal 1 is no poverty, Goal 4 is quality education, Goal 6 is clean water and sanitation, and Goal 13 is climate action.

9. Strategies and techniques used to try to achieve sustainable development (8.3.2)

The syllabus distinguishes the two words, and the distinction is stated on page 19 of the syllabus: strategies include action plans and agreements, while techniques cover the methods used. So a strategy is the plan, and a technique is the thing you actually do.

9.1 Economic

• Appropriate or intermediate technology. Equipment matched to local skills, materials, income and repair capacity: treadle pumps, rope pumps, hand dug wells with concrete linings, improved cooking stoves, animal drawn tools. Cheap to buy, repairable locally, and it does not depend on a grid or on imported spare parts.
• Microfinance. Very small loans to people with no collateral, usually for a specific productive purpose. Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, founded in 1983 by Muhammad Yunus, had around 9 million borrowers of whom roughly 97% were women, and Yunus shared the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize for the idea.
• Fairtrade. A guaranteed minimum price plus a social premium paid to producer cooperatives. For cocoa, the Fairtrade minimum was set at US$2,400 per tonne with a further US$240 per tonne premium from October 2019. The premium is spent by the cooperative on shared projects such as a school or a clean water point.
• Diversification. Reducing dependence on one crop or one mineral, so that a price fall does not become a national emergency.
• Adding value at home. Processing cocoa into chocolate, or bauxite into aluminium, inside the producing country keeps more of the final price there.

9.2 Social

• Education, and girls' education in particular. Longer schooling for girls lowers the birth rate, lowers infant mortality and raises household income.
• Primary health care and vaccination, delivered locally rather than only in city hospitals, and community health workers who reach rural villages.
• Clean water and sanitation projects, which cut waterborne disease and therefore infant mortality faster than almost any other spending.
• Community participation. A scheme designed with the people who will maintain it is far more likely to still be working in ten years. This point is the difference between a Level 2 and a Level 3 evaluation.
• Site and service schemes and self help housing, where the authority provides the plot, water, sanitation and legal tenure and the residents build the house.

9.3 Environmental

• Renewable energy at small scale. Solar home systems, micro hydro and biogas digesters supply households not reached by a grid. Bangladesh's solar home system programme installed over 4 million units in off grid rural households, largely in the 2000s and 2010s.
• Soil conservation techniques: contour ploughing, terracing, crop rotation, cover cropping and agroforestry. A 2022 mark scheme credits precisely these for a coffee growing scheme, tying soil management to "preventing or slowing down soil erosion and soil degradation".
• Afforestation and reafforestation to stabilise slopes, restore fuelwood supply and hold soil.
• Water harvesting and drip irrigation, which raise the crop obtained per litre.
• Protected areas and ecotourism, where visitor income pays for conservation and for local employment.

10. Reducing uneven development: trade, aid and debt relief (8.3.3)

Syllabus point 8.3.3 requires an evaluation of the strategies and techniques used to try to reduce uneven development, and names trade, international aid and debt relief as its examples.

This is the most important section of the topic and the least evidenced by past papers, because the previous syllabus did not require it. Treat the evaluation framework below as the thing to learn, since it is what an evaluation question will need whatever the specific scheme.

10.1 Trade

How it is meant to work. Selling goods abroad earns foreign currency, creates jobs, generates tax revenue and, unlike aid, does not have to be repeated by a donor.

Techniques used:

• Trade blocs and agreements that lower tariffs between members, such as the African Continental Free Trade Area.
• Preferential access granted by HICs to the exports of the poorest countries.
• Fairtrade certification, described in section 9.1.
• Export processing zones, where firms receive tax and customs concessions for producing for export.
• Moving up the value chain by processing raw materials domestically.

Evaluation.

• For: trade is self sustaining, it grows the tax base, and it transfers skills and technology. The Asian economies that closed the gap fastest did it through exports, not aid.
• Against: primary product prices are volatile, so income is unpredictable. Tariffs in HICs often rise with the level of processing, which discourages a producer country from processing its own crop. Export processing zones can mean low wages, weak labour protection and profits that leave the country. And the benefits can concentrate in coastal cities, widening inequality inside the country even while national figures improve.

1. world price of the single export crop falls
2. export earnings fall
3. government revenue falls
4. spending on health and education is cut
5. development slows in a year the country did nothing wrong.

10.2 International aid

Aid is the transfer of money, goods, services or expertise from one country or organisation to another, on terms more generous than commercial ones.

The United Nations target for official development assistance is 0.7% of a donor's gross national income, agreed in 1970. Total official development assistance from the main donor governments was around US$223 billion in 2023, and only a handful of countries met the 0.7% target that year.

Evaluation.

• For: emergency aid saves lives immediately. Long term aid builds infrastructure a poor government could not fund. Bottom up NGO projects are cheap, use appropriate technology, involve the community and are more likely to be maintained.
• Against: aid can create dependency and does nothing about the underlying cause. Tied aid returns much of its value to the donor's own firms. Top down projects can be inappropriate to local conditions, too expensive to maintain, and can benefit the elite rather than the poorest. Aid can be lost to corruption. Food aid given for too long undercuts local farmers and destroys the market they sell into.
• The judgement to reach: aid works best when it is long term, matched to local conditions, maintained by the people who use it, and combined with trade rather than substituted for it.

1. emergency food aid continues for years after the drought ends
2. local grain prices are pushed down
3. local farmers cannot sell their harvest at a profit
4. they stop planting
5. the region becomes more dependent on the next shipment.

10.3 Debt relief

Many of the poorest countries entered the 1990s spending more on servicing external debt than on health and education combined. The Heavily Indebted Poor Countries initiative, launched by the IMF and World Bank in 1996 and extended in 1999, cancelled debt for countries that met conditions on economic management and on directing the savings into poverty reduction. Around 37 countries have completed the process, with debt relief committed on the order of US$100 billion.

Evaluation.

• For: it frees recurrent government revenue permanently, and the money goes into national budgets rather than donor chosen projects. Several countries abolished primary school fees with the savings, and enrolment rose sharply.
• Against: the conditions attached reduce a government's control over its own policy. Relief does nothing to stop new borrowing, and several countries have since accumulated fresh debt. It also rewards the countries that borrowed most heavily, which is unfair to those that did not.

10.4 The evaluation framework to use on any scheme

Whatever the scheme, an evaluation answer is built from the same five tests, and using them explicitly is what lifts an answer into Level 3:

1. Who benefits? The whole population, or one region, one class, one gender?
2. How long does it last? Does it end when the funding ends?
3. Who maintains it? Local people with local materials, or imported engineers and spare parts?
4. What does it cost, and who pays? Is it affordable to repeat at national scale?
5. What is the environmental effect? Does it degrade the resource it depends on?

11. Detailed specific example: Bangladesh, a lower middle income country (8.3.4)

Syllabus point 8.3.4 requires one detailed specific example of a named country classified as an MIC or LIC, covering two things:

• the reasons for its current level of development
• the strategies and techniques used to try to raise its level of economic development, quality of life and standard of living.

This is the question where "Max 5 if no named or inappropriate example" bites. Learn one country properly. Bangladesh works well because it has both halves: clear physical and historical reasons for its position, and an unusually well documented set of strategies.

Cambridge recommends that detailed specific examples come from CE 2000 to the present day.

11.1 Where Bangladesh stands

Bangladesh is a lower middle income country in South Asia, reclassified from low income by the World Bank in 2015. It has a population of around 170 million on a land area smaller than England and Wales combined, making it one of the most densely populated large countries in the world. In the 2022 data its HDI was about 0.670 and life expectancy about 74 years, up from roughly the high forties at independence in 1971. It is scheduled to graduate from the United Nations list of Least Developed Countries in November 2026.

11.2 Reasons for its current level of development

Physical and environmental

• Most of the country is the delta of the Ganges, Brahmaputra and Meghna, and much of it lies less than 10 metres above sea level. Annual monsoon flooding covers a large share of the land in a normal year and far more in a bad one.
• Tropical cyclones from the Bay of Bengal repeatedly destroy housing, crops and infrastructure along the coast.
• Few mineral resources other than natural gas, so there is little to export from the ground.
• The same delta gives the country extremely fertile alluvial soil and abundant water, which is why it supports so large a population at all, and why rice yields are high.

Historical and economic

• The economy at independence in 1971 was overwhelmingly primary, based on rice and jute, with almost no manufacturing base.
• A narrow export base dependent on a small number of products left the country exposed to price movements it could not control.
• Very low income per person meant almost no domestic saving available for investment, which is the cycle of poverty in section 6.2.

Social and political

• Rapid population growth through the 1970s and 1980s meant output had to be shared among more people each year.
• Low literacy, especially among women, limited productivity and the take up of new technology.
• Periods of political instability and weaknesses in governance deterred investment.

11.3 Strategies and techniques used to raise development

Economic: manufacturing for export

The ready made garment industry is the central strategy. It grew from almost nothing in 1980 to roughly US$47 billion of exports in the 2022 to 2023 financial year, which is around four fifths of the country's total export earnings, and it employs about four million people, the large majority of them women.

1. low wage costs and duty free access to HIC markets attract garment orders
2. factories open around Dhaka and Chattogram
3. millions of women earn a cash wage for the first time
4. household incomes rise and women gain financial independence
5. demand for local services grows through the multiplier effect.

Evaluation: it transformed the economy and the position of women, but wages are low, and the collapse of the Rana Plaza factory building in 2013, which killed more than 1,100 workers, exposed the safety cost. The industry also leaves the country dependent on a single sector and on the buying decisions of foreign retailers, which is the classic narrow export base problem in a new form.

Economic: microfinance

Grameen Bank, founded in 1983, lends small sums without collateral, overwhelmingly to women, in groups whose members support each other's repayment. Loans buy a sewing machine, a mobile phone, a cow or seed and fertiliser.

Evaluation: repayment rates are high and the money reaches people no commercial bank would serve, which is a genuinely bottom up approach. But loan sizes are small, interest is not free, and microfinance builds a household enterprise rather than the factories and infrastructure a country needs at scale.

Social: education, especially of girls

A national stipend programme for girls in secondary school, running since the mid 1990s, paid families to keep daughters in education. Bangladesh reached gender parity in primary and secondary enrolment, which is unusual at its income level.

1. girls stay in school longer
2. they marry later and have fewer children
3. the birth rate falls
4. each child receives a larger share of household income and better nutrition
5. infant mortality falls and the next generation is healthier and better educated.

Social: health and NGO delivery

BRAC, founded in Bangladesh in 1972 and now among the largest non governmental organisations in the world, delivers primary health care, non formal primary schools, sanitation and microfinance through community health workers rather than through hospitals. Oral rehydration therapy, promoted door to door, cut deaths from diarrhoeal disease in children dramatically. National immunisation coverage rose from very low levels to over 90%.

Evaluation: this is bottom up, low cost, uses appropriate technology and is maintained by local people, which is why it endured. Its limitation is that it substitutes for state provision rather than building it.

Environmental: renewable energy and disaster preparation

• Over 4 million solar home systems have been installed in off grid rural households, giving light for study and power for phone charging without extending the grid.
• A network of raised concrete cyclone shelters, combined with a volunteer early warning system, has cut cyclone deaths by orders of magnitude. Cyclone Bhola in 1970 killed several hundred thousand people; comparable storms in recent decades have killed in the hundreds or low thousands.
• Embankments, raised homesteads, floating gardens and salt tolerant rice varieties are adaptations to flooding and to saltwater intrusion in the delta.

Overall judgement: Bangladesh raised life expectancy, literacy and income faster than most countries at its starting point, mainly through one manufacturing sector, sustained investment in the education and health of women, and adaptation to a hazardous physical environment. The remaining weaknesses are the narrowness of that export base, low wages, and a physical geography that climate change and sea level rise will make harder, not easier.

12. What the mark schemes actually reward

Reading real 0460 mark schemes on this topic gives four rules that the syllabus alone does not tell you.

1. "5 at 1 mark or development" is the standard 5 mark instruction. You can score five separate valid points, or fewer points each carried further. Both routes reach five. The safer route is four points with two of them developed.

2. Development means the second clause. One 2021 mark scheme adds the note: "All 'as' statements can only be credited as development." In other words, "primary employment falls" is the point; "as machinery replaces farm labour" is the development. Write both halves of every sentence.

3. Levelled 7 mark questions need a named example for the top level. The Level 3 descriptor asks for "comprehensive and accurate statements ... including reference to one or more examples", and 161 mark schemes in the 0460 bank carry an explicit cap of "Max 5 if no named or inappropriate example". Two marks, gone, before the geography is judged.

4. Statistics questions specify how many and what kind. A "use statistics" instruction on a relationship question expects data from two contrasting points, with the units included. A "do not use statistics" instruction means comparative words only, and quoting numbers there earns nothing.

5. Instructions inside the question are marked. One 2020 question offered four development plans and said choose Plan 2, 3 or 4. The mark scheme states that choosing Plan 1 scores zero for the whole answer, and that discussing why the other plans were rejected is not relevant. Read the constraint.

13. Common exam mistakes

• Writing LEDC and MEDC when the 2027 papers use LIC, MIC and HIC.
• Confusing GDP with GNP or GNI. GDP is about place; GNP and GNI are about ownership and residence.
• Quoting total GNP instead of GNP per capita.
• Saying the HDI includes "GNP". Since 2010 it uses GNI per capita.
• Saying an indicator is "inaccurate" without saying whether it overstates or understates development, and for whom.
• Describing a distribution when the question says explain, or explaining when it says describe.
• Giving no named example on a levelled question, which caps the answer at 5 out of 7.
• Naming a country but giving no figure or date. A named example is worth the middle of the ladder; place specific detail is worth the top.
• Listing aid types without evaluating any of them when the question says evaluate.
• Treating all aid as good or all aid as bad. The mark and the judgement lie in which type, for how long, and maintained by whom.
• Writing about the country example in general terms. Syllabus point 8.3.4 asks for two things: the reasons for its level of development and the strategies used to raise it. Answer both.
• Assuming the development gap is simply widening. It has narrowed between HICs and the fastest growing MICs and has not narrowed between HICs and the poorest LICs.

14. Quick revision

• Development means raising standard of living and quality of life, not just raising output.
• Nine named indicators: GNP, GDP, GNI, literacy rate, life expectancy, HDI, infant mortality rate, calorie intake, doctors per person.
• GDP is produced inside the borders. GNI is received by residents. Always say per capita.
• HDI combines life expectancy, education (expected and mean years of schooling) and GNI per capita, on a scale of 0 to 1.
• Single indicators hide distribution, hide regional variation, and measure one thing only. Composite indices fix some of that and still hide inequality within a country.
• Quality of life is wellbeing overall. Standard of living is material goods and services.
• Reasons for the gap: environmental (resources, climate, soils, landlocked, hazards), economic (employment structure, terms of trade, single export dependence, debt, lack of investment), social and political (education, health, population growth, governance, conflict, colonial history).
• World Bank income bands run on GNI per capita and are revised every July.
• Pattern: HICs in North America, western and northern Europe, Australasia, Japan and South Korea, and the Gulf. LICs concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa. MICs cover most of Latin America, North Africa and Asia.
• Sustainable development meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. Brundtland, 1987.
• Three pillars: economic, social, environmental. A scheme that fails one of the three is not sustainable.
• Strategies are plans and agreements; techniques are the methods used.
• Trade is self sustaining but volatile. Aid saves lives but can create dependency. Debt relief frees revenue permanently but comes with conditions.
• Evaluate any scheme on five tests: who benefits, how long it lasts, who maintains it, what it costs, and its environmental effect.
• One detailed country example is required at 8.3.4, and it must be an MIC or LIC, with reasons for its level of development and the strategies used to raise it.

Not the topic you were looking for? Describe what you are stuck on in your own words and we will take you to the notes that answer it.