Assessment details

The in-class defense is an opportunity for students to practice oral presentation skill, present their
viewpoint and reflection on previous groupwork, and to receive feedback on their performance from
lecturers.
For the in-class verbal defense, each student prepare a short reflection paper (500 words) to class.
Each is located 5 minutes to answer 2-3 short questions relating to their previous groupwork and
their own reflection and the last 3 topics. Short questions can range from defining concepts,
explaining theories, drawing graphs, giving real examples.

Students who do not show up for their verbal defense (without prior approval) will receive 0 mark.
Below is the list of questions for students to prepare before the oral defence:

Related to Assignment General Questions

1. Which part in your assignment that you feel you can further improve? How? What is the largest
difficulty you faced?
2. Which part in your assignment that you feel you have accomplished well?
3. What theoretical framework you did apply for your answer??

Specific questions for each topic:

1. Swan model: Explaining 4 regions in the model. Discuss which policy should be appropriate for
each purpose (restoring internal balance/external balance) using diagrams (cases in your
assignments and further examples)
2. Impossible Trinity: Explain why it is a trilemma. Examples (cases in your assignment and further
examples)
3. Mundell - Fleming model (IS – LM – BP): drawing diagrams and explain for different combined
cases: floating/fixed exchange rate regime, zero/perfect capital mobility, small/large country
(cases in your assignment and further examples)
4. Discuss arguments for and against fixed echange rate regime/floating exchanged rate regime.
5. Discuss the gains and losses of optimum currency areas. Further examples from the Eurozone
and discuss prospects for other regional blocs.

Support Resources
This assessment requires that you meet RMIT's expectations for academic integrity. More
information and advice on how to avoid plagiarism are available in the Getting Started module.

Open the academic integrity page.

Additional library and learning resources are available to help with the assessment in this course
Link to Assignment Support.

Submission Instruction
Rubric
See details in 3.2 rubric.

1. Which part in your assignment that you feel you can further improve? How? What is the largest
difficulty you faced?

The theory cannot work 100% with the reality. In this case, exports from Italy should have excessed
imports. However, only since 1992, the current account of Italy achieved the surplus while the period
1971-1992 experienced the contrast scenario.

The Swan model explanation could be improved further with the additional analysis of different
countries outside of the Eurozone. In addition, the difficulty also comes from the lack of insight and
understanding of economic situation of specific countries. Moreover, the impacts of other factors
such as politics could impact on the policy implementation. Therefore, only the model cannot totally
explain for the situation.

Mundell-Fleming model fails to explain the situation of Hong Kong. In this case, US trade war and
mass protest could be the reasons. As a result, the difficulty we face is coming from how to evaluate
outside factors into the model.

Furthermore, the assignment could do a better job at discussing arguments for and against fixed
echange rate regime/floating exchanged rate regime with additional information from the policy or
other countries. We could provide the successful or failed countries in implementing different
exchange rate policy.

2. Which part in your assignment that you feel you have accomplished well?

The Swan model did a good job in explaining the rational of Italy government in term of dealing with
trade deficit by conducting several economic policies.

Impossible trinity helps us to explain the situation of Australia well. Especially for the case of
Thailand, the country tries to deal with the trinity and ended badly. As a result, it leads to the
financial crisis in 1997-1998 which is the basis for the global crisis in 2008-2009.

Moreover, the success of flexible exchange rate from Australia case is a clear evidence for the pros
of flexible exchange rate.

Overall, the assignment has the wide variety of countries to be analyzed which could provide a
diversified picture of different economies.

3. What theoretical framework you did apply for your answer??

Purchasing power parity,

Philip curve,
Mundell-Fleming,
Spillover effect,
IS-LM,