HookIn 1960 South Korea was poorer than Ghana
In 1960, South Korea was poorer than Ghana. Its income per head was around 158 dollars, its people mostly rural farmers, its cities still scarred by war. Ghana, newly independent, had cocoa, gold and one of the higher living standards in sub-Saharan Africa. Sixty years later South Korea builds the world's ships, phones and cars and is richer than Spain; Ghana's income per head is roughly a fifteenth of Korea's. Two countries started level and ended a world apart. Explaining that gap — why some societies grow rich while others stay poor — is the whole of Global Development.
Sociologists do not agree on the answer, and the disagreement is the subject. Modernisation theorists say poor countries are held back from the inside, by traditional values and missing capital, and must follow the West's path. Dependency and world-systems theorists say they are kept poor from the outside, by a global economy rigged in the rich world's favour since colonialism. Neoliberals blame too much government; people-centred thinkers say we have been measuring the wrong thing all along. Every 20-mark essay in this topic is a version of one question: is underdevelopment caused by what poor countries lack, or by what rich countries do to them?
ModelTwo ways to explain a poor country — from the inside or the outside
Modernisation theory, the Cold War orthodoxy, argues that poverty is a starting point everyone shares and that development is a ladder every society can climb. W.W. Rostow (1960) set out five stages — traditional society, the preconditions for take-off, take-off, the drive to maturity, and the age of high mass consumption — with 'take-off' powered by Western investment, technology and a shift in values. Talcott Parsons added the cultural side: traditional values such as fatalism, ascription and loyalty to the extended family supposedly block enterprise, so the poor world must adopt Western, achievement-oriented, individualist values to progress. The policies that follow are aid, education and encouraging entrepreneurship.
Dependency theory flips the arrow. Andre Gunder Frank argued there is a 'development of underdevelopment': poor countries are not simply undeveloped but actively made poor by a world economy that has drained them since colonialism. His metropolis–satellite chain shows wealth flowing from village to regional town to capital city to the rich world, exploited at every link. Immanuel Wallerstein's world-systems theory refines this into a single capitalist world economy of a core, a semi-periphery and a periphery, in which the core keeps the periphery supplying cheap raw materials and labour. Where modernisation says 'follow us', dependency says 'break away' — through isolation, socialist revolution or regional trade blocs. For evaluation, modernisation is often attacked as ethnocentric (it assumes the Western model is the goal), while dependency struggles to explain the countries that grew rich within the capitalist system.
MechanismGlobalisation — the world shrinks, but not evenly
Globalisation is the growing interconnection of societies, and the spec wants all three strands. Economically, production is now global: a phone is designed in California, its chips made in Taiwan, assembled in China and sold everywhere, tying distant workers into one supply chain. Politically, nation-states share power upward with bodies such as the IMF, WTO and UN and downward to regions, so David Held describes a 'shrinking' of state sovereignty. Culturally, satellite TV, Hollywood and social media spread images and brands across the planet.
The argument is over what this culture-flow does. Pessimists see cultural homogenisation — George Ritzer's 'McDonaldization', and cultural-imperialism theorists argue that Western, especially American, culture is steamrolling local ways of life. Optimists see hybridity: Roland Robertson's 'glocalisation' points out that McDonald's sells vegetarian menus in Hindu areas and local dishes elsewhere, and that cultures absorb and remix global goods rather than simply surrendering to them. For evaluation, note that globalisation's benefits are wildly unequal — the same process that turned Shenzhen into a mega-city has left parts of the Sahel more marginal than ever, which is exactly the point dependency theorists press.
CaseWho actually runs development — corporations, charities and the IMF
The spec names three global players. Transnational corporations (TNCs) such as Nike, Apple and Coca-Cola are so large that Walmart's revenue exceeds the GDP of most countries. Modernisation theory welcomes them as engines of investment, jobs and technology transfer; dependency theorists see a 'race to the bottom', in which TNCs play poor countries against each other for the lowest wages and weakest regulation — Naomi Klein's No Logo documented the sweatshops behind global brands. Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) such as Oxfam and WaterAid deliver aid outside the state; supporters praise their 'bottom-up', people-centred projects, while critics argue that large NGOs can be top-down and can let governments off the hook for basic services.
International agencies — the World Bank, IMF and WTO — lend and set the rules. From the 1980s the IMF attached structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) to its loans, forcing borrowers to cut public spending, privatise and open their markets. Neoliberals argue this discipline frees enterprise; critics, including many dependency writers, blame SAPs for gutting health and education budgets across Africa in the 1990s and deepening the very poverty they were meant to cure. The same institution is hero or villain depending on the theory you bring to it.
CaseAid, trade, factories and cities — the four levers
Aid divides sociologists sharply. Modernisation theory sees it as the capital injection that triggers take-off; Dambisa Moyo's Dead Aid argues the opposite — that decades of aid have fostered dependency, corruption and stagnant economies, and that trade and investment work better. Trade raises the problem of the terms of trade: many poor countries still export cheap primary products (cocoa, coffee, copper) and import expensive manufactured goods, so a Ghanaian farmer runs to stand still — the fair-trade movement is one attempt to rebalance this. Industrialisation is the modernisation success story: the newly industrialised 'Asian Tigers' — South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong — moved from farming to manufacturing to high technology within a generation, though critics note they used heavy state planning and protection, not the free market that neoliberals recommend. Urbanisation is the double edge: cities can drive growth, but Mike Davis's Planet of Slums describes 'over-urbanisation', where migrants pour into mega-cities such as Lagos and Mumbai faster than jobs or housing appear, producing sprawling informal settlements rather than prosperity.
A high-level paragraph in a 20-mark essay on aid reads like this: 'Modernisation theorists such as Rostow would support the view that aid is effective, because a lack of capital is precisely what stops a traditional economy reaching take-off; injecting Western money, technology and expertise supplies the missing ingredient and starts the climb through the five stages. However, this can be criticised using dependency theory. Dambisa Moyo argues that more than a trillion dollars of aid to Africa has coincided with falling living standards, because aid is often tied to buying the donor's exports, props up corrupt elites and creates a dependency that removes any incentive to build a self-sustaining economy. This suggests the effectiveness of aid depends on its type: emergency and grassroots NGO aid may help, while large government-to-government loans may entrench underdevelopment.' Notice the exam moves. The paragraph does not just describe modernisation theory — it uses the theory to argue for the view, then brings in a named rival theorist to argue against it (AO3), and the final sentence reaches a judgement rather than sitting on the fence. It also ties the theory to the specific issue named in the question (aid), which is what 'applying material from the Item' rewards. That shape — a point for the view, a theorised counter, and a conclusion that discriminates between kinds of aid — is what lifts an essay from the middle band into the top.
DataDevelopment is more than GDP — Sen, gender and the demographic shift
Reducing development to GDP per head hides most of what matters, so the spec lists development's human aspects. The economist Amartya Sen reframed 'development as freedom' — his capability approach measures whether people can actually live lives they value (be educated, healthy and safe), an idea built into the UN's Human Development Index. Education is treated as human capital: schooling a workforce raises productivity, and girls' education in particular lowers fertility and child mortality. Health and demographic change move together through the demographic transition — as countries develop, death rates fall first and birth rates follow, so populations first boom and then stabilise, which is why development eventually slows population growth rather than fuelling it (the reply to Malthusian panic).
Gender is the aspect examiners most want theorised. Ester Boserup showed that development projects designed around men often sidelined the women who did much of the farming, and the shift from 'Women in Development' to 'Gender and Development' argued that you cannot develop a society while excluding half of it. Employment completes the picture: moving people from insecure subsistence work into formal, waged jobs is both a cause and a marker of development. The thread through all five aspects is Sen's — growth that does not widen people's real freedoms is not development at all.
VocabularyKey terms the mark scheme pays for
TrapsMisconceptions that cost marks
ExamWhat examiners want
AQA marks three objectives across Paper 2: AO1 (knowledge of theories, concepts and evidence), AO2 (applying them to the question and the Item) and AO3 (analysing and evaluating to reach a judgement). Global Development is examined with a 10-mark 'Outline and explain two...' question, a 10-mark 'Applying material from the Item, analyse two...' question, and a 20-mark 'evaluate' essay. On the 10-mark analyse question you must anchor each point to the Item — lift a phrase from it and develop that idea; an answer that ignores the Item is capped low however much you know.
On the 20-marker, the structure that scores is theory versus theory. Set modernisation against dependency (and bring in neoliberalism and people-centred views), and make every paragraph do the point–counter–judgement move rather than listing views side by side. Development is the most synoptic topic on the paper, so deliberately weave in theory and methods — is modernisation ethnocentric? are World Bank statistics a valid measure of development? — and always name your evidence (Rostow's five stages, Frank's metropolis–satellite, the Asian Tigers, Moyo on aid, Sen's capabilities). Reach a conclusion that discriminates: not 'both sides have a point', but which view the evidence best supports and under what conditions.