7.6单元 — 课程综合:经济发展如何连接每一个单元

(a) Gross domestic product (GDP) is the total monetary value of all final goods and services produced within a country's borders during a given year, regardless of the nationality of the producer.

(b) A valid social indicator includes literacy rate, life expectancy, infant mortality rate, or access to healthcare/education. For example, literacy rate measures the percentage of a population able to read and write, reflecting investment in education rather than income alone.

(c) GDP per capita is an average, so it masks how income is actually distributed within a country — a small wealthy elite can pull the average upward even while most of the population remains poor. It also excludes informal-sector economic activity and says nothing about quality of life, health, or environmental costs.

(d) HDI is a composite measure that combines life expectancy, education (mean/expected years of schooling), and income (GNI per capita) into a single score describing a country's overall level of development. GII, by contrast, measures gender-based disparities specifically — in reproductive health, political/educational empowerment, and labor-force participation — so a country can post a relatively high HDI while still showing substantial gender inequality reflected in a poor GII score.

(e) Rostow's five stages are: traditional society, preconditions for takeoff, takeoff, drive to maturity, and age of high mass consumption. The takeoff stage, for example, is characterized by rapid industrialization concentrated in a few leading sectors, a sharp rise in the investment/savings rate, and the emergence of political and social institutions that support sustained growth.

(f) Foreign direct investment and technology transfer from a core country can supply a peripheral country with capital, machinery, and technical knowledge it does not yet produce domestically. This investment can fund infrastructure (transportation, power, communication) and build up an industrial base, helping the country accumulate the capital and institutional capacity Rostow's model says is necessary to move from the preconditions stage into takeoff.

(g) A common criticism is that Rostow's model is ethnocentric and assumes every country follows the same linear path historically taken by Western Europe and the United States, ignoring how colonialism, unequal trade relationships, and dependency on core countries can permanently constrain a peripheral country's ability to industrialize on its own terms.

(a) Kalindra is most likely classified as a periphery country.

(b) Any one of the following supports a periphery classification: the majority of its labor force (52%) works in agriculture rather than industry or services; its leading export is an unprocessed raw material (raw cotton fiber) rather than a manufactured good; its literacy rate (61%) and internet access (18%) are both low, indicating limited human capital and technological infrastructure typical of peripheral economies.

(c) Semi-periphery countries share characteristics of both core and periphery economies — they have moderately diversified, industrializing economies that both exploit periphery countries for cheap resources/labor and are, in turn, economically dependent on core countries. They function as a buffer zone between the core and the periphery in the world-systems hierarchy.

(d) Core countries benefit by purchasing low-cost raw materials (such as raw cotton) from periphery countries and then processing them into finished, higher-value goods that are sold back at a markup, capturing most of the value added along the production chain while periphery countries remain locked into supplying cheap inputs.

(e) Modernization theory (Rostow) treats underdevelopment as an early, internal stage that every country passes through on the way to becoming developed, driven by domestic factors like savings and investment rates. Dependency theory instead argues that a periphery country's underdevelopment is caused by its structurally exploitative relationship with core countries — unequal terms of trade and capital drain keep it underdeveloped regardless of its internal savings or investment, so development requires changing that external relationship, not just waiting out a stage.

(f) Kalindra could pursue import-substitution industrialization by building domestic textile mills to spin and weave its own cotton into finished cloth or garments rather than exporting raw fiber, capturing more value domestically; complementary strategies include investing in education/infrastructure and offering incentives to attract foreign direct investment in manufacturing.

(g) By exporting finished textiles instead of raw cotton, Kalindra would capture more value added within its own economy, build a domestic manufacturing base, and increase capital accumulation — over time this diversification and industrial growth could allow it to move from periphery status toward semi-periphery status, though it would need to guard against foreign firms controlling the new factories and simply reproducing a dependent relationship in a new form.

(a) Weber's least cost theory (least cost location theory) is a model that predicts the optimal location for a manufacturing firm as the site that minimizes total costs of production — primarily transportation costs (moving raw materials to the factory and finished goods to market), labor costs, and agglomeration costs/benefits.

(b) Site A. Raw cotton fiber is a weight-losing (bulk-reducing) raw material — a large amount of raw fiber is needed to produce a smaller amount of finished, processed textile. Weber's model predicts that when the raw material loses significant weight/bulk during processing, a firm minimizes total transport cost by locating near the material source (Site A, near the cotton-growing region) and shipping the lighter finished product the remaining distance to market/port, rather than hauling the bulkier raw material a long distance to the factory (as Site B would require).

(c) A valid factor besides transportation cost is labor cost/availability or agglomeration economies — for example, Site B's larger pool of experienced garment workers represents an agglomeration/labor-force advantage that Weber's model treats as a factor that can offset higher transport costs.

(d) Deindustrialization is the long-term decline of manufacturing industry, output, and employment in a region or country, often accompanied by a shift toward a service-based economy as production is automated, relocated elsewhere, or scaled back.

(e) Based on Source 2, the mill's closure eliminated over 4,000 manufacturing jobs, and many former steelworkers were forced into lower-paying service-sector employment — reflecting a decline in average wages/income and the loss of a major contributor to the local tax base and economic multiplier effects in Draymoor.

(f) Globalization — enabled by trade liberalization and improvements in transportation and communication technology — allows firms to relocate (offshore) production to countries with lower labor and operating costs while still efficiently shipping finished goods back to their original markets. This is exactly what Source 2 describes: the mill's parent company shifted production to a new facility overseas, replacing Draymoor's domestic manufacturing jobs with lower-cost foreign production.

(g) A deindustrializing region like Draymoor could pursue economic diversification — for example, retraining displaced workers for jobs in growing sectors (technology, healthcare, renewable energy), redeveloping the closed mill site (brownfield remediation) for new commercial or green-industry use, and investing in education and infrastructure to attract new employers, reducing dependence on any single industry going forward.