Technique Masterclasses

Business Paper 4 — Global Business

Complete Worked Paper

Compiled 2026-09-29. Series chosen: June 2022, WBS14/01 (Pearson Edexcel International Advanced Level, Business, Unit 4: Global Business, Paper 01). Sources: Mark Scheme, Publications Code WBS14_01_2206_MS, Question Paper Log Number P71450A; Examiners' Report, Publications Code WBS14_01_2206_ER. Both independently re-fetched and cross-checked (pdftotext -layout against -raw, no disagreement) by this course's own research pass — see research/veridian/WBS14-verified-facts.md for the full fetch/verification log this document draws on in full. Also read in full before writing: content/veridian/curriculum/wbs14/globalisation-and-growing-economies.ts, global-expansion-mergers-and-uncertainty.ts, protectionism-and-trading-blocs.ts, global-marketing.ts and assessing-global-markets-and-locations.ts (every teach block, worked chain, level-exemplar and header provenance note — none of that teaching prose is reproduced below); every codex-deep-dive-*.md and signal-topic-brief-*.md in this folder; and content/veridian/question-bank/wbs14.ts in full (its four real entries are Oct 2022 Q1(c)/Q2 and Jan 2022/Jun 2023 Q3 — none from June 2022, so nothing below duplicates a question-bank entry). No new primary-source PDF was fetched for this document specifically; every fact and quotation below traces to the verified-facts file's own independently-checked pulls, re-checked for internal consistency against that file before being written here.

WBS14 CODEX — Complete Worked Paper: June 2022

Why this series, and not another

A "complete worked paper" needs every one of a paper's real questions independently documented well enough to write a genuine, mark-scheme-grounded answer — not just a topic the paper happened to touch on. Checked against that bar, June 2022 is the only series in this course's research with a workable claim to completeness:

QuestionMarksReal question documented?Full indicative-content bullets extracted?
1(a)4YesYes (discrete K1/App2/An1 marking points)
1(b)4YesYes (discrete K1/App2/An1 marking points)
1(c)8YesYes — 10 bullets
1(d)12YesYes — 13 bullets
1(e)12YesYes — 12 bullets
220YesYes — 13 bullets
320Yes (topic + real applied context)No — see the honesty flag under Question 3 below

Every other series this course's research has opened (October 2021, January 2023, October 2023, January 2024, plus later single-question pulls for October 2022, June 2023, January 2022, October 2024, June 2026, October 2025, January 2026) has at most two or three questions independently documented, each usually for a different spec point — never a full Q1(a)-(e)-plus-Q2-plus-Q3 set. June 2022 is not perfectly complete either — Question 3's own bullet-by-bullet indicative content was never independently pulled — but six of its seven parts are, and the seventh has enough real, confirmed material (the actual applied context, a real examiner-reported failure pattern, and this paper's own confirmed general band structure) to write an honest worked answer rather than an invented one. No other series clears even that bar across all seven parts. This document says exactly where the evidence runs thinner rather than smoothing it over.

What this document is not. Every lesson file listed above already teaches the underlying mechanisms this paper tests, mostly through VERIDIAN-original stimuli built to the same real band structures (a deliberate course-wide choice, stated in each lesson's own header, against near-verbatim past-paper reproduction in teaching content). This document is the different thing the task asked for: the actual real June 2022 questions, worked start to finish, with the marks earned made explicit against the real mark scheme — cross-referencing the mechanism lessons rather than re-deriving them. Question stems below are quoted directly only where the real wording is short enough to reproduce under this course's ~15-word quoting limit (Q1(a), Q1(b)); the longer stems (Q1(c)-(e), Q2, Q3) are paraphrased. Indicative-content bullets are paraphrased throughout, with only short, attributed fragments quoted directly.

Section A — Question 1 (40 marks, all keyed to the source-booklet extracts)

Question 1(a) — Calculate GDP per capita (4 marks)

Set exactly as: "Using Extract A, calculate to two decimal places the GDP per capita of Thailand."

Data given (Extract A): Thailand's GDP, $546bn; population, 69,410,000.

Worked answer.

GDP per capita = GDP ÷ Population = $546,000,000,000 ÷ 69,410,000 = $7,866.30

How the 4 marks are earned (real marking structure: K1/App2/An1):

Real NB rule in the mark scheme: a final answer given with no working shown can still earn all 4 marks if it is exactly right, including the $ sign and the two decimal places. The same numeric answer without the $ sign — "7,866.30" — earns only 3 of the 4 marks. The sign is treated as load-bearing, not decorative.

Real examiner-reported pattern: candidates who used the right formula generally did well; the two costly, recorded slips were dropping the $ sign and mishandling the decimal places — confirmed directly: "always showing your working is a good idea" (Examiners' Report, June 2022).

Cross-reference: the same formula, data-handling and NB rule are already taught in globalisation-and-growing-economies.ts's worked-chain Stage 1 and its MCQ-2 — this entry applies the mechanism to the real extract data as one complete answer; it does not re-derive it.

Question 1(b) — Explain an advantage of specialising in rubber (4 marks)

Set exactly as: "Explain one advantage for Thailand of specialising in the production of rubber."

Worked answer.

One advantage for Thailand of specialising in rubber production is the jobs and income this creates. Thailand is the world's biggest exporter of rubber, and 42.4% of that output is sold to China — a large, growing economy. Because Chinese demand for rubber is this large, meeting it requires many workers, and this is what creates the jobs and incomes the advantage actually consists of.

How the 4 marks are earned (K1/App2/An1):

A second, equally real route. The mark scheme itself allows "any other appropriate response." A cost-based advantage — specialising lets Thai rubber-processing businesses spread fixed costs over a much larger export market, lowering average cost per unit — is a genuinely separate, equally creditable mechanism under that allowance. The two are not the same argument stated twice; a full-marks answer only needs one of them properly developed.

Real examiner-reported pattern: most candidates correctly named a plausible advantage (job creation or export earnings), but marks were most often lost on under-development: "attempted analysis often lacked enough development to explain why the identified advantage came about" (Examiners' Report, June 2022) — naming the advantage without the causal "why" is the single most common way this question loses marks even when the right fact has been recalled.

Cross-reference: both routes (jobs/income and cost/minimum-efficient-scale) are already taught, including a worked diagram for the cost route, in globalisation-and-growing-economies.ts.

Question 1(c) — Discuss economic growth and employment patterns in Vietnam (8 marks)

Set as (paraphrased; the real stem runs to 21 words, over this course's quoting limit): discuss the extent to which economic growth in a country such as Vietnam may have caused its employment patterns to change.

Real band structure — no Level 4 at this tariff: Level 1 (1–2), Level 2 (3–5), Level 3 (6–8).

Worked answer (aimed at the Level 3 ceiling).

Economic growth means a rise in a country's GDP; employment patterns describe how a country's workforce is distributed across the primary, secondary and tertiary sectors. Before 2000, much of Vietnam's workforce worked in the primary sector. Since then Vietnam's GDP has risen steadily — it more than doubled between 2010 and 2020 alone — and growth of that scale is generally associated with rising incomes and increasing industrialisation, which tends to pull workers out of low-productivity primary-sector work and into manufacturing. Vietnam's exports of goods and services tripled over the same period, and a rise of that scale in exported services specifically would suggest a growing tertiary sector alongside the shift into manufacturing.

However, it is not certain that growth itself is what caused this change, rather than the reverse. Much of the investment behind Vietnam's industrialisation has come from businesses specifically seeking its low labour costs (FDI); it may be this FDI-seeking-cheap-labour that drove workers out of agriculture and into manufacturing, which then caused the rise in GDP — rather than growth causing the sectoral shift directly. Judging "the extent" of the link therefore means weighing both directions, not asserting one as settled fact.

How the marks are earned:

Real examiner-reported pattern — the single most costly one on this paper's data: "the term 'employment patterns' was widely misunderstood," and "far too many candidates" wrote about total employment numbers rather than the sectoral shift the question actually asked about, scoring no marks at all regardless of how well the rest of the answer was written (Examiners' Report, June 2022). The report also confirms this question needs no stated conclusion, but does need balance.

Cross-reference: the sectoral-shift mechanism, this exact misreading trap, and a VERIDIAN-original 8-mark exemplar built to this identical real band structure are already taught in globalisation-and-growing-economies.ts — this entry is the real question itself, not a restatement.

Question 1(d) — Trade opportunities for European businesses (12 marks)

Set as (paraphrased; the real stem runs to 15 words, at this course's quoting limit): assess how economic growth in developing economies may affect the trade opportunities available to European businesses.

Real band structure: Level 1 (1–2), Level 2 (3–4), Level 3 (5–8), Level 4 (9–12).

Worked answer (aimed at Level 4).

Rising GDP in developing economies means rising disposable incomes there, and rising incomes generally mean rising demand — a genuine opportunity for European businesses: a new, growing customer base beyond often-saturated western markets. That demand is not limited to consumer goods: Extract C's own evidence that developing economies' share of global exports of goods and services had reached 44.3% by 2019 suggests these economies increasingly need services too — infrastructure, engineering, transport, communications — exactly the kind of demand a European business with established expertise in those areas can supply. A related opportunity: entering a new, less-saturated market can extend a product's life cycle well beyond the point it would have reached in an already-saturated home market.

This opportunity is not one-directional. The same growth that creates new customers abroad also builds new competitors: as a developing economy grows, it develops its own domestic industries, and some — the real mark scheme names China's Haier and Lenovo, and India's Tata and Infosys — are now genuinely large, innovative global businesses fully capable of competing with, rather than simply buying from, European firms. Cheaper competing exports from firms like these increase pressure on European companies' market share, both abroad and increasingly at home.

Whether the net effect favours a given European business therefore depends on what kind of business it is. One that competes mainly on quality, brand strength or genuine innovation is well placed to keep thriving even as developing-economy competition grows, since those are dimensions a fast-growing but less-established rival typically hasn't yet matched. One whose main advantage is price alone is far more exposed, because price is precisely the dimension on which lower-cost developing-economy producers compete most directly.

How the marks are earned:

Real examiner-reported pattern: "a significant number of candidates" answered the wrong side of the question, writing about the trade opportunities for developing economies rather than for European businesses — a stakeholder-reading error, not a knowledge gap; those who kept to the right stakeholder "answered the question well" (Examiners' Report, June 2022).

Cross-reference: the wrong-stakeholder trap and the general opportunity mechanism are already taught in globalisation-and-growing-economies.ts; the Haier/Lenovo/Tata/Infosys competing argument and the 44.3% figure were a genuine gap that lesson's own 2026-09-13 bullet-coverage audit closed. This entry uses the real question and figures directly; the lesson's teaching prose is not repeated here.

Question 1(e) — Impact of trading-bloc membership on businesses in Thailand and Vietnam (12 marks)

Set as (paraphrased; the real stem runs to 20 words): assess the possible impact on businesses in countries such as Thailand and Vietnam of their membership of a trading bloc.

Real band structure: a single integrated Level 1 (1–2), Level 2 (3–4), Level 3 (5–8), Level 4 (9–12) ladder — not a separate knowledge/application/analysis band followed by a separate evaluation band.

Worked answer (aimed at Level 4).

A trading bloc is a group of countries with some form of trading agreement between them, typically based on free trade or preferential access and reduced protectionism. For a business based in a member country, this creates a real opportunity: easier access to fellow members' markets increases potential sales and revenue, and cheaper imported inputs from fellow members can lower costs and create a genuine competitive advantage over rivals still paying the un-reduced price. Freer trade of this kind should also support growth region-wide: lower prices from reduced costs support rising disposable income and, in turn, rising demand for local businesses generally.

However, the same easing of trade restrictions removes protection domestic businesses previously had. Once tariffs fall, industries that relied on that protection become relatively less competitive against imports, and low-cost producers based in other member countries may find it easier to penetrate the home market — increasing competitive pressure on domestic firms and putting their sales and profits at risk. A further, less obvious cost applies specifically where the bloc is a customs union with a shared external tariff: a business still sourcing inputs from outside the bloc can find the cost of those inputs has actually risen, since the bloc's common external tariff now applies to non-member suppliers even though it does not apply to fellow members.

Whether membership is a net benefit for a given business depends on where it sits in this trade-off: an export-oriented business sourcing mainly from fellow members and selling into the newly-accessible bloc market is well placed to gain considerably more than it loses; a business focused on its own domestic market that relies on cheap inputs from outside the bloc is far more exposed to the competitive and cost-side pressures the same membership brings.

How the marks are earned:

Real examiner-reported pattern: unusually for this paper, this question was "mostly well answered" — most real candidates covered the market-access and cheaper-input benefits and balanced this against the threat to domestic businesses once trade barriers fell (Examiners' Report, June 2022). This is not a question defined by one dominant failure mode the way 1(c) and 1(d) are.

Honesty flag. RCEP appears in this real mark scheme's own indicative content as valid supporting context, but RCEP is not one of the three trading blocs the WBS14 specification names (4.3.1.5(a): EU, ASEAN, NAFTA/USMCA). A student relying on RCEP as their only worked example of "a trading bloc," without also being able to discuss one of the three spec-named blocs, is leaning on content this specific mark scheme happened to reward rather than content the spec guarantees will always be creditable.

Cross-reference: the ASEAN mechanism, a worked chain quoting this exact question's own common-external-tariff bullet, and two level-exemplars built to this same real band structure are already taught in protectionism-and-trading-blocs.ts — this entry is the real question worked end-to-end, not a restatement of that lesson's teaching.

Section B — Question 2 (20 marks)

Set as (paraphrased; the real stem runs to 17 words): evaluate the extent to which a global business will benefit from adapting to local tastes and preferences. Real paired case: Nike ("Nike Unite," store formats and stock shaped around locally-played sports) against Aldi (its European store format exported essentially unchanged into the US market).

Real band structure: Level 1 (1–4), Level 2 (5–8), Level 3 (9–14), Level 4 (15–20).

Worked answer (aimed at Level 4).

Glocalisation — adapting a global product or service to local tastes and preferences — is standard practice among successful multinationals, because taking local preferences into account can capture sales a fully standardised approach would miss. Nike illustrates this directly: shaping local stores and stock around the sports actually played in a given community can attract more of that community's own sportspeople, build brand loyalty, and encourage repeat purchases a generic, one-size-fits-all format would not — a real competitive advantage over rivals who haven't adapted the same way.

Aldi illustrates the opposite, equally valid strategy: entering the US market with its European format essentially unchanged. This is a deliberate bet that proven success elsewhere is itself strong evidence the same model will work again, and where that confidence is well placed, not adapting has its own real advantage — a standardised approach lets a business realise economies of scale across every market at once, a cost advantage a locally-adapted competitor's higher research-and-adaptation costs generally cannot match.

Both routes carry a real, matched cost. Adapting to local tastes costs more to research and run as multiple region-specific offers rather than one global one — worth paying only if the resulting sales gain outweighs it. Standardising risks the opposite: if the market genuinely wants something different from what worked at home, a business that hasn't adapted risks losing sales a locally-tailored competitor would have captured, with none of the cost saving realised if the standardised offer doesn't sell.

Which strategy actually serves a given business better depends on a specific, statable condition: the nature of the product or service, not the business's size or origin. Food and drink products are more exposed to genuine local differences in taste and custom, and are more likely to need real adaptation to sell well — exactly the logic behind Nike's sports-specific approach, since sport is itself a genuinely locally-varying preference. Products whose appeal is closer to universal are far better candidates for Aldi's standardised route, since there is little local difference left to capture by adapting in the first place. The strongest answer to "should a global business adapt" is therefore neither "always" nor "never," but "it depends on what is actually being sold, and to whom."

How the marks are earned:

Real examiner-reported pattern: the most common candidate-supplied outside examples were McDonald's and Apple; the strongest real answers concluded the right approach "depended on the product or service in question and its intended market," rather than defending either extreme without qualification (Examiners' Report, June 2022).

Cross-reference. The full glocalisation spectrum, the algebraic revenue-vs-cost derivation behind both cases, and three VERIDIAN-original level-exemplars at other tariffs on this and adjacent content are already taught in global-marketing.ts. A fuller real-fact roster — the specific McDonald's "Mcaloo Tikki" and Kit-Kat localisation examples, and Sony/Ferrari named alongside Apple as near-universal products — is already gathered in codex-deep-dive-global-marketing.md in this folder. Neither is repeated here; this entry is the real question worked as one complete essay-length answer with its own mark-by-mark accounting.

Section C — Question 3 (20 marks)

Set as (paraphrased; the real stem is only partially preserved even in this course's own primary research — see the honesty flag below): evaluate whether push factors or pull factors matter more when a business decides where to locate. Real applied context, drawn from a top-scoring candidate's own outside-knowledge answer as reproduced in the real examiner report: rising US/China tariff costs as a push factor for a business currently manufacturing in China to serve the US market; Vietnam, India and Mexico presented as lower-cost pull destinations.

Real band structure: Level 1 (1–4), Level 2 (5–8), Level 3 (9–14), Level 4 (15–20) — this paper's same general 20-mark Evaluate structure used for Question 2 above.

Worked answer (aimed at Level 4, within the limits stated in the honesty flag below).

A push factor is a problem located in a business's current market that reduces the value of staying there; a pull factor is an attractive feature of a market it does not yet operate in. Rising US/China tariff costs are a real, current push factor for a business manufacturing in China specifically to serve the US market: the cost of simply staying where it is has risen, regardless of how attractive any alternative destination looks — that is what makes it a push factor, not the existence of somewhere better to go. Vietnam, India and Mexico, offered as lower-cost alternatives, are real pull factors operating on the same decision at the same time.

Whether the push factor or the pull factor is actually doing more of the deciding work depends on the nature of the specific business. One with a flexible, easily-relocated supply chain can act on an attractive pull factor almost immediately, so for that business the pull factor is doing most of the real deciding work — the destination's attractiveness is what actually moves the decision, and the push factor mainly supplies the reason to start looking. A business tied to a specific, scarce input — a mine, an oilfield, a resource that exists only where it exists — has little real freedom to respond to any pull factor, however attractive, because relocating means abandoning the resource the business depends on; for that business, the push factor matters more in practice, precisely because acting on any pull factor is far harder to actually do.

The more general pattern: push factors are the type more likely to force a decision on their own, since a genuinely deteriorating home market eventually leaves little real alternative regardless of how attractive elsewhere looks; pull factors are opportunities a business can choose to act on or not — which is why, for most businesses without an unusual resource constraint, a real push factor combined with a strong pull factor (as in the tariff/Vietnam-India-Mexico case) is normally what actually tips a decision, rather than either type acting alone.

How the marks are earned:

Real examiner-reported pattern: many candidates "limited their marks by just...producing lists of push and pull factors without developing or analysing them"; most did state a preference for one factor type, but this typically came with "no rationale or justification" for the choice (Examiners' Report, June 2022, Q3 commentary).

Honesty flag — read before treating this section as equal-strength to the six above. Unlike Question 1(a)-(e) and Question 2, this course's own research has not independently extracted this specific mark scheme's full, bullet-by-bullet indicative content for Question 3 — only the question's real topic, its real applied context (the tariff/Vietnam-India-Mexico case, itself a candidate's own outside-knowledge example reproduced inside the real examiner report, not Pearson's own official question stimulus), the real examiner-reported failure pattern quoted above, and this paper's own confirmed general 20-mark Evaluate band structure. The worked answer and level-by-level marking above are built honestly from those four real, confirmed elements, but this is not a claim that every line above appears verbatim in the real June 2022 mark scheme's own indicative content for Question 3 — that specific document has not yet been independently pulled and checked line-by-line by this course's research. Treat this answer as well-evidenced in its context and its failure mode, but not bullet-verified the way the six answers above are.

Cross-reference. The push/pull mechanism, the same real tariff/Vietnam-India-Mexico case (flagged there too as a candidate's own outside knowledge rather than the paper's official stimulus), the same real examiner-reported error, and a full worked chain plus a genuine 20-mark level-exemplar already exist in assessing-global-markets-and-locations.ts — see that lesson for the deeper mechanism derivation. This entry presents the real question as one complete worked answer with its own mark-by-mark accounting, not a restatement of that lesson's teaching prose.

Paper-level summary

QuestionCommandMarksReal indicative content independently verified?
1(a)Calculate4Yes
1(b)Explain4Yes
1(c)Discuss8Yes (10 bullets)
1(d)Assess12Yes (13 bullets)
1(e)Assess12Yes (12 bullets)
2Evaluate20Yes (13 bullets)
3Evaluate20Partial — see honesty flag above
Total80

Section A (Question 1, parts a–e) totals 40 marks; Section B (Question 2) and Section C (Question 3) each carry 20 — matching this paper's own confirmed 4+4+8+12+12 / 20 / 20 = 80 structure (see paper-anatomy.ts).

Limitations, stated plainly