Section 5.5 Evaluation of growth and development strategies - notes
As a grand finale to your IB economics course, the first bullet point in this section does not involve any new body of knowledge (that's the good news!), but draws instead upon all the other sections of the syllabus (not such bad news!). In academic-speak, this is known as 'synoptic' - any assessment in this area in particular will test your understanding of the connections between the different elements of the syllabus content and will require you to demonstrate understanding of the inter-relatedness of different economic issues, theories, concepts and institutions.
To enable you to appreciate this inter-relatedness, we will identify what we believe are the key sections of the syllabus to enable you to evaluate growth and development strategies, and will then direct you to some questions and outline answers, so that you can test your level of understanding.
Aid and trade - this is covered mainly in section 5.4 on growth and development strategies, but would also link with section 4.2 on free trade and protectionism.
Market-led and interventionist strategies - an evaluation of these in terms of achieving growth and/or development really could be all embracing! Some possible sections to look at for this are:
- Section 1 - rationing systems, free market versus mixed versus centrally planned economies (advantages/disadvantages of different forms of resource allocation)
- Section 2.1 - markets/competition, functions of price in resource allocation (the role of markets)
- Section 2.3 - productive and allocative efficiency (benefits of market-led strategies)
- Section 2.4 - market failure and government intervention / response (problems of market-led strategies/need for government intervention)
- Section 3.4 -demand management (interventionist), supply-side policies (market-led)
- Section 3.5 - unemployment/inflation as consequences of market-led/interventionist strategies
- Section 3.6 - income distribution in same context as 3.5 above
- Section 4.2 - free trade (market-led), protectionism (interventionist)
- Section 4.3 - globalisation (market-led), trading blocs (combination of market-led and interventionist)
- Section 4.6, 4.7 and 4.8 - exchange rates, balance of payments problems and terms of trade (impact of market-led/interventionist strategies on these?)
- Section 5.3 - barriers to economic growth and/or development (particularly the sections on international trade and international financial barriers)
- Section 5.4 - growth and development strategies (particularly the sections on types of aid, export-led growth/outward-oriented strategies (market-led), import substitution/inward-oriented strategies (interventionist) and foreign direct investment)
For this section, we suggest that you have a look at the questions on market-led and interventionist strategies in the development. Try in each case to formulate a plan of how you would tackle them using bullet points. If you were writing an essay, or an answer to the final part of a data response question, each bullet should represent a paragraph which you would use to fully expand upon each of the points in your list. Examiners are very keen on structure and the use of paragraphs. These questions are extremely open-ended, there are no right or wrong answers - follow the links in each case for a selection of points you could have raised.
In this section we consider the following topics in detail:
- IMF and World Bank
- Other international organisations
- Private sector banks
- Non-governmental organisations
- Multinational corporations
- Commodity agreements
