IB Geography Unit 4: Power, places and networks

What Unit 4 covers

Unit 4 is the first of the three units of the HL core extension. Global interactions and global power: how globalisation is measured, with the KOF Index; hard, soft and smart power; and world systems theory's core, semi-periphery and periphery. Global networks and flows: transnational corporations and global supply chains, offshoring, outsourcing and reshoring, flows of foreign direct investment and official development assistance, and the roles of the IMF and the WTO. Human and physical influences on global interactions: protectionism, with tariffs, quotas, embargoes, subsidies and dumping; free trade areas and customs unions; special economic zones; containerisation and the extra trade costs of being landlocked; the digital divide; and resistance to globalisation, from anti-globalisation protest to resource nationalism.

Where students slip

• Offshoring is about place: moving a company's own production to another country. Outsourcing is about ownership: contracting the work to another company, which may be at home or abroad.
• In a free trade area, members remove tariffs between themselves but each keeps its own tariffs on outsiders. A customs union goes further: its members also share a common external tariff.
• Hard power is not only military. Economic coercion, such as sanctions, is hard power too; soft power works through attraction, through a country's culture, values and policies.