Deep Dive: Assessing Global Markets and Locations

#CODEX Deep-Dive: Assessing Global Markets and Locations

Provenance (2026-09-28). Read in full: research/veridian/WBS14-verified-facts.md — the 4.3.2.1–4.3.2.3 sections, the "Topics with enough verified material for a genuine standalone lesson" ranking, this lesson's full lesson-audit log (the 2026-09-13 bullet-coverage pass, the 2026-09-14 second independent reconciliation pass, and the REVISED 2026-09-25 content-gap and trap-taxonomy passes), and the paper-mechanics / command-word tables. Read in full: content/veridian/curriculum/wbs14/assessing-global-markets-and-locations.ts — header provenance note, every worked chain, the chain-drill, trap-taxonomy, conditional-judgement-drill, all three level-exemplars, and the closing flag block. Grepped for topic overlap: content/veridian/technique-hub/wbs14/codex-definitions-and-application-bank.md, forge-exam-technique-guide.md, signal-frequency-and-boundaries.md, and content/veridian/question-bank/wbs14.ts (no entries tagged to this lesson's topic found there). No new primary-source PDF was fetched for this document specifically; every real exam citation below is inherited, and re-checked for internal consistency against the lesson file, from the verified-facts file's own independently re-fetched and pdftotext-cross-checked pulls — see that file for the fetch/verification method behind each one.

#What this document is, and isn't

This is a single-topic reference for spec 4.3.2, items 1–3 only — conditions that prompt trade, assessment of a country as a market, and assessment of a country as a production location — matching the exact scope of assessing-global-markets-and-locations.ts. Spec 4.3.2.4 (mergers, takeovers, joint ventures) and 4.3.2.5 (exchange-rate impact, skill shortages) belong to a different lesson (global-expansion-mergers-and-uncertainty.ts) and are out of scope here.

It does not re-teach what the lesson file and the existing CODEX definitions-and-application-bank already do well: the full step-by-step derivation of why market-assessment and production-location factors diverge, the complete Porter's-five-forces worked chains (pet food and Glovo), the level-exemplars, and the trap-taxonomy all already live there and are cross-referenced rather than reproduced. What follows is additive in three ways: (1) a compact model map of every factor this topic requires, with each factor's real evidence status stated honestly rather than left implicit; (2) short micro-examples for the sub-cases that currently have no worked illustration anywhere in this course; and (3) a full angle-by-angle catalogue of every real question this exact topic has actually been tested from, assembled in one place for the first time.

#Part 1 — The model, mapped factor by factor

#4.3.2.1 Conditions that prompt trade

Four distinct mechanisms, not one:

• Push factors — a condition inside the firm's current market that reduces the value of staying there: a saturated market, intensifying competition. Defined entirely by conditions at home.
• Pull factors — an attractive feature of a market not yet served: higher sales/profitability, risk-spreading across markets whose economic cycles don't move together, economies of scale from larger combined output.
• Cost competitiveness via off-shoring or outsourcing — a different lever entirely (cost, not demand). Off-shoring moves the firm's own production abroad, keeping ownership, typically via FDI; outsourcing pays an independently-owned external firm to produce to spec, giving up day-to-day control but avoiding the capital outlay. The two trade control for capital commitment in opposite directions, and which one a business should prefer follows from what it has most to lose from giving up control — a highly-specified, low-differentiation product has little to lose from outsourcing; a business whose value sits in a proprietary process has much more reason to pay for off-shoring's control.
• Product life cycle (PLC) extension — entering a new geographic market restarts the sales trajectory of a product that is maturing or declining at home, without the cost of developing something new. The confirmed exam trap is answering with generic new-market-entry benefits instead of this specific "reuse, don't redevelop" mechanism.

Real evidence status. Push/pull is confirmed as a genuine 20-mark Evaluate essay topic (June 2022 Q3). PLC extension is confirmed as an 8-mark Discuss (January 2024 Q1c). Cost competitiveness by off-shoring/outsourcing has no standalone past-paper anchor anywhere in the series this course has opened for WBS14 — it remains spec-certain, not past-paper-confirmed, and every worked example of it in this course (the UK electronics-vs-clothing-firm MCQ, the wage/productivity off-shoring calculation) is this course's own invented VERIDIAN material, not Pearson's, and is presented as such in the lesson's own provenance note.

#4.3.2.2 Assessment of a country as a market

Spec 4.3.2.2.a names five factors; 4.3.2.2.b names one analytical tool.

The honest core of this sub-point's evidence base: of the six things spec 4.3.2.2 lists, only the five-forces application (item b) has been directly, repeatedly confirmed as its own standalone question. The five individual factors under item (a) are spec-certain — Pearson could set any of them as the focus of a future question — but the series sampled so far have not caught one tested as a standalone 4.3.2.2.a question in its own right, only echoed as context inside other questions.

#4.3.2.3 Assessment of a country as a production location

Nine named factors.

Three of nine location factors are past-paper confirmed within this course's sample (political stability, ease of doing business, ROI); six remain spec-certain only.

#Why the shared-name factors diverge (cross-reference, not re-derivation)

Infrastructure, political stability and ease of doing business appear on both lists under the same name. assessing-global-markets-and-locations.ts already derives, in full and with two real supporting anchors (Senegal/Guinea/Mali; Vietnam/Cambodia/Laos), why the weight of each — not its definition — diverges: a market entry commits marketing/distribution spend that can be scaled back if conditions worsen; a production-location decision commits a large, illiquid, physically-fixed capital investment that cannot be relocated. That derivation is not reproduced here; see that lesson's third worked chain.

#Part 2 — Short micro-examples for the sub-cases with no worked illustration elsewhere

Everything in this section is this document's own construction, not drawn from any real Pearson mark scheme or examiner report, and is flagged as such — consistent with this course's existing "Illustrative only" convention. Each is short by design: enough to fix the mechanism, not a full past-paper-length answer.

• Costs of production (location factor). A furniture manufacturer compares two countries with identical wage rates but very different timber and energy prices; the country with cheaper energy and raw-material access is the lower-cost production location even though its wage bill is the same — cost of production is a bundle of inputs, not a synonym for wage cost alone.
• Labour skills/availability (location factor, distinct from a skill shortage). A precision-tooling business needs CNC-machine operators. One candidate country has cheap general labour but very few workers with that specific qualification, so its low wage cost doesn't translate into a viable production base — availability of the right skill, not labour cost generally, is the binding constraint.
• Location in a trade bloc (location factor). A car-parts manufacturer builds its plant inside, rather than just outside, a customs union, so its output reaches every member country tariff-free from that one site — a different and larger benefit than simply exporting into the bloc from outside it, which still faces the bloc's common external tariff.
• Government incentives (location factor). Two otherwise-identical sites are available to a manufacturer; one government offers a multi-year corporate tax holiday and subsidised industrial land. The incentive can tip the decision, but — because it is typically time-limited or conditional — it doesn't offset a genuine structural disadvantage, such as poor transport links, once the incentive period ends.
• Natural resources (location factor). A copper-smelting business must locate near an ore deposit regardless of how a country scores on every other 4.3.2.3 factor — the resource's physical location is close to a hard constraint, not one input weighed equally against the others, echoing the same qualifying exception the real Vietnam/Cambodia/Laos mark scheme itself makes for resource-extraction businesses.
• Exchange rates (market factor, distinct from the 4.3.2.5 exchange-rate-impact content point). A UK business selling into a market where the local currency weakens against sterling finds that even unchanged local-currency sales convert to fewer pounds on repatriation. The market-assessment question this factor answers is "will revenue earned here still be worth having once brought home?" — a different question from the separate 4.3.2.5 content point, which asks how a currency movement affects an already-operating business's ongoing competitiveness.

#Part 3 — Every real exam angle this topic has actually been tested from

Assembled from the verified-facts file's own citations; every entry below traces to a real Pearson mark scheme or examiner report that file independently fetched and cross-checked (pdftotext -layout against -raw, both agreeing — see that file's own method notes for each). "Seen in N of M series checked" language only; no invented likelihoods or grade boundaries appear anywhere below.

4.3.2.1 — Conditions that prompt trade

1. Push vs. pull, judged not listed — June 2022, Q3, 20-mark Evaluate. Real context: rising US/China tariff costs as a push factor; Vietnam, India and Mexico as lower-cost pull destinations. Real, repeated examiner finding: many answers were reduced to "producing lists of push and pull factors without...analysing them," and where a preference was stated it usually came with "no rationale or justification."
2. PLC extension — January 2024, Q1c, 8-mark Discuss (Level 1 1–2 / Level 2 3–5 / Level 3 6–8). Real, examiner-confirmed trap: candidates default to generic new-market-entry benefits instead of the specific "reuse an existing product, save development cost" mechanism the question actually tests.

4.3.2.2 — Assessment of a country as a market

1. Porter's five forces, pet food — October 2025, Section B Q2 (Publication Code WBS14_01_2510_MS), 20-mark Evaluate. Real named rivals: Nestlé, Mars, Hill's Pet Nutrition, Blue Buffalo, Colgate-Palmolive. Real expansion regions for new entrants: Latin America, Asia Pacific, the Middle East, Africa, Eastern Europe. Real market-growth figure: the market expanding to $145.3bn by 2028. Real limitation credited: five forces "only looks at the current state of the market" and has no mechanism for that same growth.
2. Porter's five forces, Glovo — October 2022, Q3 (Publication Code WBS14_01_2210_MS, Question Paper Log Number P72168A), 20-mark Evaluate. Real context: Glovo doubling its investment in Africa. Real named substitutes: Gokada, Jumia Food. Roughly 8,000 partner restaurants (low supplier power); 300,000+ customers (fragmented buyer power). Real, differently-shaped limitation: five forces "does not take into account the levels of consumer incomes," misses political instability and an "unpredictable regulatory environment," says nothing about poor infrastructure, and ignores high start-up costs and ease of doing business — closing line: Porter's five forces is, at best, a guide that "needs to be supplemented by more rigorous research."

4.3.2.3 — Assessment of a country as a production location

1. Political stability — January 2023, Q1d (Publication Code WBS14_01_2301, Question Paper Log Number P72456A), 12-mark Assess (L1 1–2 / L2 3–4 / L3 5–8 / L4 9–12). Real case: Senegal, its gas/oil reserves cited as the real driver of recent FDI growth, held up against neighbouring Guinea and Mali (coups, terrorist attacks named directly). Real balancing evidence: JLR's decision to expand production in Slovakia, and Nissan's need for a deep-water port specifically at Sunderland — both cases the mark scheme itself uses to show a different factor outweighing political stability. Two further real reasons credited for why stability matters beyond sunk-capital risk: a less likely sudden change in economic policy, and lower corruption reducing ongoing costs.
2. Ease of doing business — October 2021, Q1d, 12-mark Assess. Real comparative case: Vietnam ranked 70th against neighbouring Cambodia (144th) and Laos (154th). Real balance: Vietnam's own flagged weaknesses in supply-chain quality and workforce skill can matter more than the ranking alone, and a resource-extraction business must locate near the resource regardless of any country's ranking.
3. Likely return on investment — October 2023, Q1e, 12-mark Assess. Real, examiner-confirmed as the worse-answered of that series' two 12-mark questions: candidates either misunderstood the term as a location factor or conflated it with investment-appraisal calculation technique — a separate, quantitative content point — and those who did understand it often "dismissed it without development" before pivoting to unrelated factors.

Cross-cutting trap, spanning 4.3.2.2 and the adjacent spec point 4.3.3.1 — independently documented in a real Principal Examiner's Report (October 2023, Q3, Vietnamese cosmetics market): "a significant number of candidates" "knew little, or nothing, about Porter's matrix" and "confused it with Porter's five forces" — two different tools mapped to two different spec sub-points (4.3.2.2.b vs. 4.3.3.1.d), worth a deliberate final check that the two can be told apart.

#Part 4 — Honest evidence summary

• Sample base. This topic's evidence rests on the WBS14 series this course has actually opened and mined to date: October 2021, June 2022, January 2023, October 2023 and January 2024 as the original five-series pass, plus two later single-question targeted pulls (October 2025 Section B Q2; October 2022 Q3) made specifically to close gaps flagged in that original pass. Every "confirmed" claim above traces to one of those pulls; none is extrapolated to a series not actually opened.
• Best-evidenced sub-points. Porter's five forces for market assessment (two independent full questions, two different businesses, two different limitations), and political stability / ease of doing business / return on investment for production-location assessment (three independent 12-mark Assess questions — this topic's single most-tested tariff within its own scope).
• Thinnest sub-points. Cost competitiveness via off-shoring/outsourcing (4.3.2.1.c), and five of the nine named production-location factors — costs of production, labour skills, trade-bloc location, government incentives, natural resources — have no standalone past-paper anchor in the sample checked. They remain spec-certain and teachable, which is why Part 2 above gives each a short illustrative treatment, but none should be presented to a student as past-paper-confirmed, and none is claimed as such anywhere in this document.
• Inherited caveat. The verified-facts file itself notes that a sample of this size cannot rule out a different real question surfacing content none of this topic's currently-confirmed anchors test — see that file's own "Flagged issues" section for the general version of this caveat, which this document inherits rather than re-derives.

#Sources

• research/veridian/WBS14-verified-facts.md — spec 4.3.2.1–4.3.2.3 sections, "Topics with enough verified material" ranking, lesson-audit log (2026-09-13, 2026-09-14, and REVISED 2026-09-25 passes), paper-mechanics and command-word tables.
• content/veridian/curriculum/wbs14/assessing-global-markets-and-locations.ts — header provenance note and closing flag block (the full anchor list and fetch/verification method behind each one).
• Publication Codes cited directly above: WBS14_01_2510_MS (October 2025 Q2, pet food); WBS14_01_2210_MS (October 2022 Q3, Glovo); WBS14_01_2301 (January 2023 Q1d, Senegal). October 2021 Q1d (Vietnam/Cambodia/Laos) and October 2023 Q1e (return on investment) are cited by series/question identifier only, as given in the verified-facts file, which does not separately restate a Publication Code for either — neither was independently re-fetched for this document.