Changing economies

Cambridge IGCSE Geography 0460 · Paper 2 Human Geography Syllabus: 2027, 2028 and 2029 Official syllabus points: 9.1.1 to 9.3.5

Topic 9 is one of the five human topics examined on Paper 2. It brings together three things that the previous syllabus kept apart: employment structure, which used to sit inside the development topic, industry location, which used to be its own section, and tourism. The 2027 syllabus treats them as one story about how a country's economy changes as it develops and as it joins the world economy.

Every extended question in this topic is marked on the same ladder: simple statements at the bottom, a named example in the middle, and place specific detail, meaning real names, real figures and real roads, at the top. The mark schemes for this topic print the same warning again and again, "Max 5 if no named or inappropriate example", so a correct but placeless answer is capped at 5 out of 7 by rule, not by the examiner's judgement. Learn the two detailed examples in section 13 properly.

1. Classifying industry into sectors

Syllabus point 9.1.1 names four sectors. You can be asked to define any of them, to place a named job in the right one, or to identify the sector shown in a photograph. Photograph identification is a standard 3 mark opener in this topic.

How the examiner asks it. One real paper gave three job descriptions and asked for the sector of each. The mark scheme is unforgiving and mechanical:

• workers who carry out research and use it to design new machines = quaternary;
• drivers of lorries transporting products from the factory = tertiary;
• people operating machines in the factory = secondary.

Notice that all three people work at the same factory. The sector is decided by what the person does, not by which company employs them or which building they sit in.

Exam trap: a lorry driver delivering steel to a car plant is tertiary, not secondary. A geologist searching for oil is quaternary if the work is research, primary if the work is extraction. If a job is genuinely ambiguous, a real mark scheme accepted "secondary/quaternary" for a photograph of a laboratory attached to a works, so say which sector and why.

A useful check. Ask what the worker touches. Raw material out of the ground is primary. Raw material turned into a product is secondary. A product or a person moved, sold or looked after is tertiary. Ideas and information are quaternary.

2. Changing employment structure in LICs, MICs and HICs

Employment structure means how the working population is divided between the sectors. A real 1 mark mark scheme accepts "how the population is divided up by the work they do" or "the proportion in primary, secondary and tertiary".

The 2027 syllabus uses low income countries (LICs), middle income countries (MICs) and high income countries (HICs). Past papers up to 2024 used LEDC, MEDC and NIC. The geography is identical, so if your textbook uses the old labels, translate them: LEDC becomes LIC, NIC becomes MIC, MEDC becomes HIC.

The general pattern

Read that as a sequence, not as three separate columns. Primary falls throughout. Secondary rises and then falls again. Tertiary rises throughout. Quaternary appears only at the end. The single most common lost mark on this question is writing that secondary employment simply rises, when the mark scheme wants "increase in secondary followed by decrease".

Figures printed on real 0460 papers

These come from resource material used in the exam itself, which makes them safe to quote.

• Egypt, an LIC in the paper's own wording, had 57% of its working population in the primary sector in 1960.
• Bangladesh had between 52% and 54% in primary industry in 1970, falling to about 40% later in the same graph.
• Brazil, described in the paper as a newly industrialised country, moved its primary sector from about 18 or 19% in 2007 to 10 or 11% in 2017, a fall of roughly 8 percentage points, while tertiary rose from about 58 or 59% to 68 or 69%, a rise of roughly 10 percentage points.
• Germany and Egypt in 2010 shared one similarity worth a mark: tertiary was the largest sector in both countries. The difference was that tertiary was larger in Germany and primary was far larger in Egypt.

That Germany and Egypt comparison is worth learning as a warning. By 2010 an LIC could already have tertiary as its biggest sector, because informal urban service work grows quickly. Do not assume primary is always the largest sector in a poorer country.

Why the structure changes

Mark schemes credit one mark per reason, or a mark for developing a reason. Explaining the mechanism turns a listed reason into a developed one.

Why primary employment falls

• Mechanisation and automation of agriculture, so one machine replaces many field workers.
• Exhaustion of natural resources, so mines, quarries and fisheries close.
• Loss of agricultural land to urban growth, housing, industry and distribution centres.
• Imports of food and raw materials become cheaper than producing them at home.
• Low pay in farming pushes workers towards better paid work.

Why secondary employment rises and then falls

• It rises with investment by governments and by transnational corporations, and with rising demand for manufactured goods.
• It falls later because of mechanisation and automation, competition from abroad where wages are lower, exhaustion of local raw materials, and because a richer country finds it cheaper to import manufactured goods than to make them.

Why tertiary and quaternary employment rise

• Higher incomes mean more disposable income to spend on services, from restaurants to health care.
• More leisure time and longer holidays, so more jobs in tourism and leisure.
• Longer life expectancy, so more demand for medical and care services.
• Better education and higher skills, so the workforce can do service and research work.
• Rural to urban migration puts people where service jobs are.
• Advances in high technology and ICT, and growth in research and development, which create quaternary work.

1. mechanisation of farming
2. fewer workers needed per hectare
3. rural unemployment
4. migration to cities
5. labour available for factories and services
6. primary share falls while secondary and tertiary shares rise.

Exam trap: two real questions on the same idea gave opposite instructions. One said "You should use statistics in your answer", with a mark reserved for a correct figure. Another said "Do not use statistics in your answer". A third mark scheme simply printed "Note: No statistics". Read the instruction, because a statistics answer to a no statistics question earns nothing for the figures.

Why employment structure is used as a development indicator. It is a single measurable figure that reflects mechanisation, education, resource use and demand all at once, and it can be compared between countries and over time. Its weakness is that it says nothing about who is employed, about pay, or about the size of the informal sector, which is very large in many LICs and often not counted at all. One Paper 4 investigation in the bank tested exactly this, comparing the share of squatter settlement residents working informally in two settlements, 73% in one and 41% in the other.

3. Factors influencing the location and distribution of industry

Syllabus point 9.1.3 lists ten factors by name. The examiner can ask about any one of them, and 7 mark questions ask you to describe and explain the location of a named factory or industrial zone.

Mark schemes also credit three factors that are not printed in the syllabus list, so add them to your revision:

• Ports, listed separately from transport in several content guides, because proximity to a deepwater port is decisive for exporters.
• Inertia, meaning an industry staying in a place after the original reason has gone, because the buildings, skilled workforce, suppliers and reputation are already there.
• Availability of flat land, which the mark schemes treat as a point in its own right.

Bulk reducing and bulk gaining industries

A real mark scheme spelled this out with a worked figure. A bauxite processing plant sits at the quarry because about five tonnes of bauxite are needed to make one tonne of alumina, only small quantities of other inputs such as caustic soda are required, and the finished product is far lighter. Moving the raw material would cost far more than moving the product.

1. raw material is heavy and loses most of its weight in processing
2. transport cost is dominated by the raw material
3. the plant locates at the source of the raw material.

The reverse also earns marks. Where the finished product is bulky, fragile or perishable, or gains weight in production, the plant locates at the market. Bottling a drink adds water and glass, so bottling plants are near cities, not near the flavour supplier.

Why factories move

Two separate 5 mark questions asked why factory owners were considering relocating. The mark scheme gives both the reason and the development mark:

• lack of space to expand, because neighbouring industries have taken the nearby land;
• congested or narrow roads in an old industrial area, so time is lost in traffic;
• excessive land cost, when cheaper land is available on the urban edge;
• government incentives elsewhere, such as tax concessions in an enterprise zone;
• cheaper or more available labour elsewhere, for example in LICs where wages are low;
• growth of a new and larger market, especially where population is growing rapidly;
• an old building that is inefficient in layout, and a wish to move to a modern one;
• canal or water transport no longer being used, since goods now travel by road.

A named factory: Nissan, Sunderland, northeast England

Learn one secondary industry site in this much detail, because "Max 5 if no named or inappropriate example" is enforced strictly here. One mark scheme even specifies that an example which is primary or tertiary industry is inappropriate for this question, and another rules out naming a whole country rather than a site.

• Land. The plant was built on the flat, drained, already cleared site of the former RAF Usworth airfield at Washington, Sunderland, a site of roughly 300 hectares, big enough for single storey assembly lines and for later expansion.
• Transport. It sits beside the A19 dual carriageway, which connects north to the A1(M), and is roughly 10 km from the Port of Tyne, used for exporting finished cars by ship.
• Labour. The northeast had very high unemployment after the closure of its coal mines and shipyards, so a large and willing workforce was available locally.
• Political policies. The area carried UK regional assistance, and the government offered grants to attract the investment. The decisive political factor was tariff free access to the European single market from a UK site, which was why a Japanese firm built in Britain at all.
• Technology and suppliers. A supplier park was developed next to the plant so that components arrive just in time, which cuts the cost of holding stock.
• Scale. Production began in 1986, the plant employs roughly 6,000 people directly with thousands more in supplier firms, and output passed 500,000 vehicles in its best year, 2016. A battery plant was later built next to the site to supply electric models.

Notice how many of the mark scheme's "place specific reference" hooks that paragraph contains: named roads, a named port, a named year, a named site history and a real employment figure.

A note on the industrial system. The old syllabus required inputs, processes and outputs including waste for an industrial system, and it required the industry types manufacturing, processing, assembly and high technology. Neither is a listed requirement for 2027. The vocabulary has not disappeared entirely, though: the mark scheme for describing the characteristics of a TNC lists "Inputs; Output; Processes" as creditable content, so the words are still worth having.

4. What globalisation is, and its key features

Globalisation is the process by which countries, economies and people become more closely connected and more interdependent, so that goods, money, people, information and ideas move more easily and more quickly around the world.

Syllabus point 9.2.2 asks separately for the key features, which means the observable characteristics of a globalised world rather than its causes.

• World trade has grown faster than world output, so a rising share of what is made is sold abroad.
• Global supply chains. A single product is designed in one country, has components made in several others and is assembled in another.
• Transnational corporations operate across borders and organise that division of labour.
• Free trade agreements and trade blocs lower or remove tariffs, for example the World Trade Organization, the EU, ASEAN and the CPTPP.
• Global financial markets move money electronically and continuously, so capital can be invested anywhere within seconds.
• International migration of both low paid and highly skilled labour.
• Time and space convergence. Places are effectively closer than they were, because travel and communication take less time and cost less.
• Global brands and global media, so the same products, films, music and sports are consumed worldwide.
• A global division of labour, with routine assembly concentrated where wages are low and research and headquarters functions concentrated where skills are high.

Why globalisation has happened

The content guides for the 7 mark globalisation questions are almost identical across several sessions, so this list is close to the official answer.

• Technology. Faster and cheaper transport, quicker and cheaper air travel, and the development of containerisation and container ships.
• Communications. The rise of the internet and e commerce, instant electronic communication, online meetings, and the instant electronic movement of money and accounts.
• Transnational corporations, which build the international links in order to cut their own costs.
• Variation in wage rates globally, which gives firms a reason to move production.
• Weak or absent legislation on wages and on the environment in some countries, which lowers the cost of producing there.
• Trade agreements and free trade, and global banking.
• Global demand, and westernisation, meaning the spread of a similar pattern of consumption.
• Communications media and advertising, which create demand for the same products everywhere.

1. containerisation standardises cargo
2. loading and unloading time falls from days to hours
3. the cost of shipping a manufactured item across the world becomes trivial compared with its price
4. firms can separate where a good is made from where it is sold
5. production moves to wherever labour is cheapest.

A marking rule you must know. One mark scheme for "Explain why globalisation has occurred. You should refer to named examples" prints: "Max. L2 6 marks with one named example, L3 7 marks with two or more named examples." Globalisation questions are the one place in this topic where a single named example is not enough. Plan to use at least two named places or two named firms.

5. The impacts of globalisation

Syllabus point 9.2.3 names five areas. Sort your answer under them and remember that impacts in this syllabus are positive and/or negative, social, economic and environmental, and at a range of scales.

Scale matters, and it earns marks. The same event has different impacts at different scales. A new assembly plant is a local employment gain, a national export gain, and a global emissions cost. Saying so explicitly is one of the cheapest ways to reach Level 3 on an impacts question.

6. Transnational corporations: role and global organisation

A transnational corporation (TNC), also called a multinational, is a company that has its headquarters in one country and operates production, sales or research facilities in several others.

A real 3 mark question asked for "three typical features of a transnational corporation". The mark scheme is short and should be memorised:

• branches in many countries, or all over the world;
• headquarters usually in a high income country;
• manufacturing often in lower income countries;
• serves international markets;
• uses high technology and mechanisation.

A longer 7 mark question asked for characteristics and global links, and the content guide adds location, size, inputs, outputs, processes, workforce and trade, with place specific credit for named locations and specific details of products.

How a TNC organises itself globally

The organisation follows the cost of each activity, and this is the mechanism the examiner wants explained.

Why a TNC operates in many countries, which is a question that has been set directly:

• to reach cheaper labour, and therefore lower production costs;
• to be inside a market, avoiding tariffs and transport costs and responding to local taste;
• to obtain raw materials at source;
• to take advantage of government incentives, tax rates and weaker environmental or labour regulation;
• to spread risk across several economies, so a recession in one does not stop production;
• to operate around the clock across time zones;
• to grow beyond a saturated home market.

Identifying globalisation from a resource. A 5 mark Paper 2 question gave a map and a graph for a coffee chain and asked for the evidence that it is a globalised TNC. The mark scheme rewarded: raw materials sourced from many continents, with at least two named; outlets on many continents, with at least two named; a valid statistic from the map, for example over 1,000 shops in the US and 25 to 99 in Australia; and a valid statistic from the graph quoting years, for example shops rising from 200 in 1987 to about 5,800 in 2003. When a resource is given, the marks are in the resource. Quote it.

7. Evaluating the impacts of TNCs on host countries

Syllabus point 9.2.5 says evaluation, which means you must weigh the two sides and reach a judgement, not list them.

A marking rule. One 5 mark advantages and disadvantages question printed "Note: MAX 3 on Advantages/disadvantages". You cannot earn all five marks from one side. Whenever a question names two sides, write both, and aim for a rough balance.

How to write the evaluation. The honest judgement is that a TNC brings real gains that a poorer country cannot easily generate on its own, above all wage employment, foreign exchange and infrastructure, but that it keeps most of the value it creates, that the jobs are only as secure as the firm's own cost calculation, and that the environmental and social costs stay in the host country while the profit leaves it. The strongest answers add that the outcome depends on the host government: where regulation, tax collection and minimum wages are enforced, more of the benefit stays.

1. TNC opens an assembly plant
2. thousands of wage jobs are created
3. wages are spent locally on housing, food and transport
4. local businesses grow and hire
5. tax revenue rises
6. government invests in schools and roads. This is the multiplier effect.

1. the same plant repatriates its profits
2. little of the value added stays in the country
3. the host depends on one firm for a large share of its exports
4. if that firm relocates to a cheaper country, the jobs and the export earnings go with it.

8. Why tourism has grown

Tourism is travel away from home for leisure, recreation, business or visiting friends and relatives, involving at least one overnight stay.

Syllabus point 9.3.1 asks for the factors behind its growth as an industry.

Economic

• Rising real incomes in HICs and, more recently, in MICs, so more households have money left after essentials.
• The rapid growth of outbound markets in MICs, above all China and India, which has changed where the world's tourists come from.
• Cheaper travel. Jet aircraft, wide bodied aircraft, budget airlines and package holidays cut the real cost of a foreign holiday sharply.

Social

• Paid holiday entitlement and a shorter working week, so people have time as well as money.
• Longer life expectancy and earlier retirement, producing a large market of older travellers with free time.
• Wider awareness of destinations through television, film, advertising and social media.
• Health and safety. Better vaccination, medical provision and travel insurance make distant travel feasible.

Technological and political

• Online booking, comparison sites and reviews, which removed the travel agent as a barrier.
• Improved communications, so travellers can stay in contact with home and with work.
• Government investment and promotion, including airport construction, resort development and marketing campaigns.
• Visa liberalisation and, in some regions, open borders.
• New products: ecotourism, adventure tourism, cruises, sports and music events, and city breaks.

Physical and human attractions. A separate strand of questions asks why tourists come to a particular place. The mark schemes split these carefully.

Two marking notes to memorise. For a question on physical attractions, the mark scheme states "No credit for reference to formation of landforms/human attractions", so do not explain how the arch formed. And on a physical and human attractions question, the mark scheme distinguished a bare named built attraction, which it placed at Level 1, from an answer that said what kind of attraction it is, for example a historic building, which it placed at Level 2. Name the feature and say what it is.

Why visitor numbers vary

A 5 mark question asked why numbers vary over time, both annually and seasonally. Both halves must appear.

• Seasonal: the industry is seasonal by nature, for example a skiing season or a cherry blossom season; tourists avoid the monsoon, the hurricane season or extreme heat; school and national holidays concentrate demand.
• Annual: economic fluctuations and recession in the tourist generating country; terrorism and political unrest; health scares and epidemics; new airports, new resorts and new attractions; advertising, publicity and film or television exposure; currency exchange rates.

9. The Butler model

The Butler model, also called the tourist area life cycle, shows how a tourist destination is expected to develop over time, plotting visitor numbers against time as an S shaped curve with six stages. It is a new requirement at syllabus point 9.3.2, so learn it explicitly rather than assuming your textbook covers it.

Carrying capacity is the maximum number of visitors a destination can support before the environment is damaged, the facilities are overwhelmed, or the quality of the visitor experience and the tolerance of residents fall. Exceeding it is what turns stagnation into decline.

Strengths of the model

• It is a general framework that fits the observed history of a wide range of resorts.
• It makes the crucial point that growth is not infinite, and it introduces carrying capacity.
• It is genuinely useful for planning, because it warns managers to invest and diversify before stagnation rather than after decline.
• It can be tested with data, since visitor numbers over time are recorded, which is why it appears as a suggested fieldwork enquiry.

Limitations of the model

• It is a description, not a law. It says what has often happened, not what must happen.
• The length of each stage is not defined, and varies from a few years to a century, so the model cannot tell you when the curve will turn.
• Not every resort passes through every stage. Purpose built resorts, planned and financed from the start, effectively begin at the development stage.
• It has no place for external shocks. A pandemic, a hurricane, a terrorist attack, a currency collapse or a change in visa rules can cut numbers at any stage, and the model neither predicts nor explains them.
• It measures only visitor numbers, not spending, not employment and not damage. A resort can have falling numbers and rising income, or vice versa.
• It treats a destination as a single unit, when in practice different parts of a coast or a city are often at different stages at the same time.
• It does not distinguish types of tourism, so a destination shifting from mass tourism to high value ecotourism looks like decline.

Applying it to a real graph

Because the model is new, no past paper names it. But a 2020 Paper 1 question printed a graph of tourist numbers in Acapulco, Mexico, from 1920 to 2010, and the mark scheme describes the shape as: slow growth up to 1940, a steep increase from 1940 to 1970, a levelling off with growth slowing between 1970 and 2000, then an increase again from 2000. That is the Butler curve exactly: exploration and involvement to 1940, development to 1970, consolidation and stagnation to 2000, and rejuvenation after 2000. Expect the 2027 papers to hand you a similar curve and ask you to label the stages, so practise reading a stage off a graph rather than only reciting the list.

10. The benefits and problems caused by tourism

Syllabus point 9.3.3 says at a range of scales, which means local, regional, national and global. It is also the point where the mark schemes are strictest about who or what is affected.

Benefits

Problems

The single most important marking rule in this topic. On a question about the problems tourism causes for local people, the mark scheme states plainly: "Problems must be for people and not the natural environment." Environmental damage only scores if you carry it through to a human consequence, and the mark scheme shows the ladder precisely:

• "deforestation, so there is less firewood" = Level 1, because it only states the problem;
• "lack of firewood, so people must travel longer distances to collect it" = Level 2, because it explains the effect on people;
• "air pollution" = nothing; "air pollution causes breathing difficulties" = Level 1; "water pollution contaminates drinking water and people suffer typhoid" = Level 2.

That is the whole difference between a middling and a strong answer in this topic. Always take the chain one step further, to a named person or a named place.

1. hotels discharge untreated waste water into the lagoon
2. nutrient levels rise and coral is smothered
3. reef fish stocks fall
4. local fishing families lose income and must buy imported fish at tourist prices.

11. Managing tourism sustainably

Syllabus point 9.3.4 asks for an evaluation of the strategies and techniques, at a range of scales. Naming a method is Level 1. Explaining how it works is Level 2. Naming a place with figures is Level 3. Judging each method against its drawbacks is what evaluation means.

Sustainable tourism means tourism that meets the needs of visitors, the industry and host communities today without damaging the environment or the culture that future generations will depend on. Ecotourism is the narrower idea of small scale, low impact tourism in a natural area, run so that local people receive the income and the habitat is protected.

How to write the evaluation. Site level techniques such as fencing, guides, boardwalks and visitor caps work quickly and cheaply, and they are the ones a national park can actually deliver, but they only protect the exact spot they cover and they cut income. National measures such as tourist taxes, planning law and required sewage treatment reach the whole industry and raise reliable revenue, but they need enforcement and they do not change tourist behaviour if the sums are small. The strongest answers finish at the global scale: a destination can manage every local impact well and still lose its reef to bleaching or its beach to sea level rise, because the largest threats to tourism are driven by emissions the destination does not control. Sustainable management therefore reduces damage to an acceptable level; it does not remove it.

12. What the mark schemes reward

This topic has more explicit marking rules printed in its mark schemes than almost any other, and they are consistent across sessions.

• "Max 5 if no named or inappropriate example." This appears on nearly every 7 mark question in this topic. No named example means a Level 2 cap of 5 out of 7 whatever the quality of the geography.
• What counts as an inappropriate example is defined. For a factory location question: "such as primary or tertiary industry", and elsewhere "such as a country". For a tourism problems question: the example "must be an area or a small country/island e.g. Menorca/Andorra/Jamaica". Choosing a whole large country as your tourism example can cost you two marks before you write a word.
• Globalisation questions need two examples, not one, for Level 3.
• Balanced questions are capped on each side. One 5 mark advantages and disadvantages question printed "MAX 3 on Advantages/disadvantages".
• Place specific reference is defined for you. The mark schemes list it as "locational details, specific details of location/road numbers", "named location of areas supplying industry", "specific details of transport routes", "names of places within chosen area", and "specific details/statistics". That is a checklist. Put a road number, a district name, a year and a figure into every 7 mark answer.
• Detailed specific examples should be from CE 2000 to the present day, which the syllabus states directly. An example from the 1970s is a weaker choice.

13. Detailed specific examples

Two separate detailed examples are required, and they are not interchangeable. Point 9.2.6 needs a country or area with globalisation impacts and a named TNC located there. Point 9.3.5 needs a country or area with reasons for tourism growth, benefits and problems, and sustainable management.

13a. Globalisation and a TNC: Vietnam, and Samsung Electronics

Why Vietnam globalised

• Doi moi, the economic reform programme launched in 1986, opened a centrally planned economy to private business and foreign investment.
• Vietnam joined ASEAN in 1995, signed a trade agreement with the United States in 2001, and joined the World Trade Organization in January 2007, which gave its exports predictable access to member markets.
• It later joined the CPTPP and signed a free trade agreement with the EU, cutting tariffs further.
• Labour costs are well below those in coastal China, while literacy and school enrolment are high, which makes Vietnam attractive for assembly work.
• Its long coastline and deepwater ports at Hai Phong in the north and around Ho Chi Minh City in the south connect directly to container shipping routes.

The named TNC: Samsung Electronics

• Headquarters in Suwon, South Korea, with manufacturing, assembly and research spread across many countries. This is the classic TNC structure: research and headquarters in a high income country, assembly where labour is cheaper.
• Samsung began mobile phone production in Vietnam at Bac Ninh province in 2009, opened a second complex at Thai Nguyen in 2013, and later added display manufacturing and a research and development centre in Hanoi, opened in 2022.
• Its cumulative investment in Vietnam is above US$20 billion, making it the country's largest single foreign investor.
• It employs roughly 90,000 to 100,000 people in Vietnam directly, with many more in the supplier firms clustered around the plants.
• Samsung's Vietnamese operations account for a substantial share of Vietnam's total export value, commonly reported at around a fifth, and a large share of the world's Samsung smartphones is assembled there.

Impacts of globalisation on Vietnam

Positive

• Employment. Hundreds of thousands of factory jobs paying a regular wage above farm income, many taken by young women migrating from rural provinces.
• Structural change. Agriculture employed well over half the workforce in the early 1990s and now employs roughly a quarter, while manufacturing and services have grown. This is syllabus point 9.1.2 happening in real time.
• Exports and foreign exchange. Vietnam moved from a food exporting economy to one whose largest exports are electronics, phones, machinery and textiles.
• Infrastructure. Foreign investment and government revenue funded expressways, port expansion at Hai Phong, and new airport terminals.
• Poverty reduction. The share of the population living in extreme poverty fell dramatically over the same period.
• Skills and technology transfer, especially through the research centre and the supplier network.

Negative

• Dependence. A very large share of national exports rests on the decisions of a handful of foreign firms. When Samsung's global sales slow, Vietnam's export figures slow with them.
• Leakage. Most of the profit returns to the parent company in South Korea, and many high value components are imported rather than made locally, so the value added inside Vietnam is smaller than the export figures suggest.
• Working conditions. Long shifts, high production targets and dormitory living have drawn repeated criticism.
• Pollution. The clearest case is the Formosa Ha Tinh steel plant, a Taiwanese owned investment, which in April 2016 discharged toxic waste water and killed large quantities of fish along roughly 200 km of central Vietnamese coastline, devastating local fishing and coastal tourism. The company accepted responsibility and agreed compensation of US$500 million. It is the standard illustration of environmental cost being borne by the host country.
• Cultural change. Global brands, fast food, foreign media and English language use have spread rapidly, particularly among young urban Vietnamese.

Evaluation. Globalisation gave Vietnam something it could not have generated internally at that speed: capital, technology, export markets and mass wage employment, and the fall in poverty is real. But the model concentrates risk in a small number of foreign firms, keeps most of the value abroad, and has imposed environmental costs on communities who received none of the benefit. The gains are largest where the government has used tax revenue to fund infrastructure and education, and smallest where regulation was not enforced.

13b. Tourism: the Maldives

The Maldives is a nation of about 1,190 low lying coral islands grouped into 26 natural atolls in the Indian Ocean, southwest of Sri Lanka. Only around 200 islands are inhabited. Average ground level is roughly 1.5 metres above sea level, which makes it one of the lowest lying countries on Earth. It is a small island country, which is exactly the kind of example the mark schemes call appropriate for this question.

Reasons for the growth of tourism

• Physical attractions. White coral sand beaches, sheltered shallow lagoons, warm clear water, extensive coral reefs, and marine wildlife including manta rays, whale sharks and turtles. A tropical climate with a reliable dry season from roughly December to April.
• Human attractions. Over 160 resorts, water villas, diving and snorkelling operations, spas, and an established reputation as a honeymoon and luxury destination.
• Access. The first resort opened in 1972. Velana International Airport near Male provides direct long haul connections, with seaplanes and speedboats for onward transfers to individual islands. Growing air links to the Middle East, China, India and Europe opened new markets.
• Government policy. Tourism has been deliberately developed as the national industry through resort leasing, airport investment and international marketing.
• Wider factors. Rising incomes and outbound travel from China and India, cheaper long haul flights, online booking, and heavy exposure on social media.

Tourism is now the country's largest industry, generating roughly a quarter to a third of GDP, the great majority of foreign exchange earnings and a large share of government revenue, with annual arrivals in recent years of roughly 1.8 to 2 million, far more than the resident population.

Benefits

• Employment in resorts, boats, seaplanes, construction, diving and guiding, in a country with very few alternative industries.
• Foreign exchange and tax revenue, funding schools, health care and the transport network across a scattered island nation.
• Infrastructure: airports on outer atolls, harbours, desalination plants, electricity and telecommunications reaching islands that would otherwise not justify the investment.
• A market for local fishermen and farmers, supplying resorts.
• Guesthouse tourism on inhabited local islands, legalised in 2009, which for the first time let ordinary Maldivians earn directly from tourism rather than only working in a resort. This deliberately spread the multiplier effect beyond the resort islands.
• Conservation funding, since the value of the reefs to tourism is the main political argument for protecting them.

Problems

• Water. There is almost no natural fresh groundwater on a small coral island, so resorts rely on desalination, which is energy intensive and expensive, and a resort guest uses several times as much water as a resident.
• Waste. Solid waste is shipped to Thilafushi, an artificial island in the lagoon near Male created in 1991 to 1992 as a landfill, which receives hundreds of tonnes a day and has suffered burning waste, leaching into the lagoon and hazardous working conditions.
• Reef damage from anchoring, dredging for harbours and seaplane channels, land reclamation, sewage discharge and physical contact by divers and snorkellers.
• Coral bleaching, driven by warm sea temperatures during the 1998 and 2016 El Nino events, which killed a very large share of shallow water coral. This is a global cause with an entirely local economic effect.
• Leakage. Many resorts are foreign owned and many guests arrive on foreign airlines through foreign tour operators, so a large share of the price paid never enters the Maldivian economy. Most food and construction material is imported.
• Employment quality. Resort work means long rotations away from family on a separate island, and many senior positions have historically gone to expatriate staff.
• Cultural tension. The Maldives is a Muslim country in which alcohol and beachwear are restricted on inhabited islands. Guesthouse tourism has brought tourists and residents into contact and required careful rules.
• Vulnerability. With almost the whole economy in one industry, an event elsewhere in the world, such as a global downturn or a travel restriction, stops national income almost overnight.

Strategies and techniques used to manage tourism sustainably

• The "one island, one resort" policy. Resorts occupy their own uninhabited island, which concentrates the environmental impact on a site that can be managed and keeps tourist behaviour away from local communities. Planning rules also limit how much of a resort island may be built on, commonly cited as around a fifth of its land area, with buildings set back from the vegetation line.
• The Green Tax, introduced in 2016, charged per tourist per night, initially US$6 at resorts and US$3 at guesthouses, and raised since. It is simple to collect and produces reliable revenue for environmental management.
• Baa Atoll, designated a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve in 2011, with a protected core, a buffer zone and a transition zone where people live and work.
• Hanifaru Bay in Baa Atoll, a marine protected area where manta rays and whale sharks gather. Access is managed by limiting the number of people in the water at any one time, banning scuba diving so that bubbles do not disturb feeding, and requiring boats to keep clear.
• Protected species. Shark fishing was banned throughout Maldivian waters in 2010, and turtles and rays are protected, because a living reef shark is worth far more to diving tourism than a dead one.
• Required environmental infrastructure. Resorts must provide their own desalination, waste water treatment and, increasingly, solar generation.
• Coral restoration. Resort based coral nurseries and reef monitoring programmes replant fragments on damaged reefs.
• Guesthouse tourism, which is itself a sustainability strategy, because it retains income locally and reduces leakage.
• Adaptation. Hulhumale, an artificial island begun in 1997 beside the airport, was reclaimed to about 2 metres above sea level, deliberately higher than the natural islands, to house a growing population safely. The Maldives has also used its position as a leading voice in international climate negotiations, including the widely reported underwater cabinet meeting of 2009.

Evaluation. The one island one resort model is genuinely effective at containing local damage and protecting Maldivian culture, but it also concentrated the profit in foreign hands, which is precisely why guesthouse tourism was later opened up. Protected areas such as Baa Atoll and Hanifaru Bay work well because the attraction is a single site that can be policed, and the visitor caps there are enforceable. The Green Tax is cheap to collect and raises reliable money, but at a few dollars a night it funds management without changing behaviour. Waste and water management remain the weakest points, as Thilafushi shows. Most importantly, every one of these measures operates at the local or national scale, while the largest threats, coral bleaching and sea level rise, are global. The Maldives can manage tourism sustainably and still lose the reefs, which is why its government has treated international climate agreements as part of its tourism policy. That is the judgement to reach: national management reduces the damage it can reach, and has no power over the damage it cannot.

14. Fieldwork links for Paper 4 and Component 3

The 2027 syllabus lists suggested human geography enquiries, and four of them come from this topic. Paper 4 questions are built on exactly this kind of investigation.

• Which stage of the Butler model have different tourist towns in the region or named area reached?
• Comparing the environmental benefits and problems caused by tourism in the local area.
• How sustainable is the management of tourism in a local National Park?
• Do the benefits for the local community of a named mine or industry outweigh the disadvantages?
• Is there a pattern to the location of TNCs in a nearby city?

Methods to be able to describe

• Pedestrian and visitor counts. Count everyone passing a fixed point for a fixed period, for example five minutes, repeated at the same times at each site, using a tally chart.
• Traffic and coach counts at a car park or an entrance, to measure pressure at a honeypot site.
• Environmental quality surveys and bipolar scoring, scoring litter, noise, congestion, building condition and visual attractiveness from, for example, +3 to -3 at each site.
• Land use mapping of a resort or an industrial estate, classifying each building or unit by function and shading a base map.
• Questionnaires to residents and to visitors, using closed questions for easy comparison and a small number of open questions for attitudes, and sampling randomly to avoid bias.
• Footpath transects, measuring path width and bare ground with distance from a car park to quantify trampling.
• Secondary data, such as published visitor numbers over time, which is the only practical way to place a resort on the Butler curve.

Reliability points that earn marks

• Count at the same times of day and on comparable days at every site, because a Saturday count and a Tuesday count are not comparable.
• Repeat counts and take an average, because a single coach arriving distorts a five minute count.
• Increase the sample size of questionnaires, and sample at several locations, because interviewing only at a resort entrance reaches tourists and misses residents.
• Bipolar scores are subjective, so have two people score independently and compare, or agree the criteria in advance.
• Some data is seasonal. Fieldwork done out of season understates the pressure, so say so in your evaluation.
• Published visitor figures may be collected differently in different years, so a long time series can contain a break that is not a real change.

15. Common exam mistakes

• Giving no named example on a 7 mark question. The mark scheme caps you at 5 out of 7 by rule.
• Choosing an inappropriate example: a primary or tertiary industry for a factory location question, a whole country for a factory location question, or a large country for a tourism problems question.
• Using only one named example on a globalisation question, when the mark scheme requires two for Level 3.
• Naming a place but giving no detail. Level 3 needs road numbers, district names, dates and figures.
• Writing that secondary employment simply increases as a country develops. It increases and then decreases.
• Answering a question about problems for local people with environmental damage, and stopping there. Carry the chain through to the effect on people.
• Explaining how a landform was created on a question about physical attractions for tourists. The mark scheme gives no credit for formation.
• Listing tourism management methods without saying how each works, or without a drawback, on a question that says evaluate.
• Writing only about the negative side of TNCs or of tourism. Balanced questions are capped at three marks from either side.
• Using statistics when the question says not to, or omitting them when a mark is reserved for a figure.
• Confusing the sector with the employer. Everyone at a car plant is not in the secondary sector.
• Treating the two detailed examples as one. Point 9.2.6 needs a country plus a TNC. Point 9.3.5 needs a tourism area. They are separate case studies.

16. Quick revision

• Four sectors: primary extracts, secondary manufactures, tertiary serves, quaternary researches. The sector follows the job, not the employer.
• As a country develops: primary falls throughout, secondary rises then falls, tertiary rises throughout, quaternary appears last.
• Ten location factors: land, labour, raw materials, energy, transportation, markets, political policies, technology, communications, containerisation. Add ports, inertia and flat land from the mark schemes.
• Bulk reducing industry locates at the raw material, bulk gaining industry locates at the market.
• Globalisation causes: technology, containerisation, the internet, TNCs, wage differences, weak legislation, trade agreements, global banking, global demand.
• TNC features: branches in many countries, headquarters in an HIC, manufacturing in lower income countries, international markets, high technology.
• TNC evaluation: jobs, foreign exchange, infrastructure and the multiplier against leakage, low wages, pollution and dependence.
• Tourism growth: higher incomes, paid holidays, cheaper flights, package holidays, online booking, longer life expectancy, media exposure, new MIC markets.
• Butler: exploration, involvement, development, consolidation, stagnation, then rejuvenation or decline. Carrying capacity decides which.
• Butler limitations: it is descriptive, has no timescale, ignores shocks, measures only numbers, and purpose built resorts skip the early stages.
• Tourism problems for people must be carried through to a human consequence to reach Level 2.
• Sustainable tourism management: protected areas, visitor limits, fees and taxes, guides, boardwalks, local employment, education, planning controls, restoration.
• Two detailed examples required: a country plus a named TNC, and a tourism area with growth, benefits, problems and sustainable management.
• A named example is worth two marks. Place specific detail is worth the top mark.

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