Questions relate to Balance of Payment and International Trade Statistics for five countries.

BEA706 International Financial Management Assignment 1
Instructions
Your group and list of countries
Questions in the assignment are related to specific countries (5 in total). Your countries will always refer to the list of 5 countries allocated to your group (US, Australia, China plus the 2 countries you have chosen). You must allocate the percentages of workload to each of the group member.
The cover page in this document will replace the general Group Assignment Cover Sheet available from the School.
Format
Assignments are to be typed using Garamond or Book Antiqua font size 12pts. Text paragraphs should be single spaced and justified (as in these instruction pages). Analysis should be no more than 6 pages in length plus 1 page of executive summary. Any references (articles, websites, database links, news articles) should be referenced in footnotes in the SAME font with smaller size (size 10 pts). Use Cover Page template (first page) in this document as your starting point. All graphs and tables should be appropriately referenced and labelled, as well as be efficient. Marks will be deducted for not following format guidelines or using space for graphs inefficiently (e.g. no more than half a page for a single graph).

What I expect
The questions in this assignment relate to Balance of Payment and International Trade statistics for the five countries that have been assigned to you. I would like to give you some advice on what I expect.
The most effective way of writing this assignment is for you “to become” a young analyst working for a leading national economic or finance organization or Federal Government office under, of course, a close supervision of your manager. You will be providing your management with updates, relevant statistics, and major issues associated with the nations assigned. Your first task is to address the following:
A. Find out the major trading partners for each of your countries. Concentrate on top 5 exporters and top 5 importers. What goods and services each of your countries export/import? Do you observe the “usual trend” (developing countries export goods, developed exporting services)?
B. To become fully versed in the economic situation of the countries you have been assigned, you decide to equip yourself with a detailed knowledge of the balance of payments for each of the country for the last 20 years . To avoid embarrassing situations during your staff meetings or performance evaluation you decide to examine in detail the trade balance, current account balance, financial account balance, and overall balance (in % of GDP where appropriate) to give you a sound background knowledge and provide your management with a brief overview.
C. You then set a goal to address and discuss in your report the following: What economic factors might have accounted for changes in these balances over time? (you will have to do a little research online about each country’s economic/political situation for the past 20 years and link it with the material you have read in Chapters 2,3,4,6,7 and 8 when explaining balance of payments changes). You may want to consider some of the main macroeconomic variables to support your discussions – most of the time Datastream will have 20 years of relevant historical data. IMF, World Bank, OECD, or Penn World Table might provide you with additional data.
D. A current-account surplus is not always a sign of health; a current-account deficit is not always a sign of weakness. Comment in the context of the 5 countries that are assigned to you.
E. The World Bank regularly compiles and analyses the external debt of all countries globally. As part of their annual publication on World Development Indicators, they provide summaries of the long-term and short-term external debt obligations of selected countries online. Go to their website or use Datastream and find the decomposition of external debt for the 5 countries you have selected.
F. What are the links between shifts in the current account balance and changes in savings and investment? Don’t forget to include an examination of government budget deficit and surpluses, explaining how they are related to their country’s savings and investment and current account balances through the identities we discussed in Week 2.
Remember, your manager is a busy man/woman and may not read your report since you are low on the totem pole but your career depends on impressing him or her. So you want him/her to read your analysis. You will prepare a report with an executive summary in point form that whets his/her appetite to read your analysis. Executive summary should not be just a list of points or topics you are addressing!!! It should outline the main issues discussed and should capture attention. Your analysis itself will have headings , paragraphs, highlights, appropriate graphs and tables to impress him or her even more. At MOST your report will be 6 pages of analysis (perhaps less if you find a way of explaining everything in fewer than 6 pages…after all Sherron Watkins explained to Ken Lay the disaster that was brewing at Enron in ONE page! ), plus the one page Executive Summary. Your report should and will look very professional.
The reason you are taking this initiative is that you want to be noticed, of course. This is the time for you to seize the moment to wave your flag, toot your trumpet and show the management what a great employee you are and that you deserve a major promotion (with the attendant compensation)! So one of the purposes of your report is to toot your trumpet. MAKE SURE HE/SHE REMEMBERS YOU AND YOUR REPORT!
There will be NO TYPOS, NO GRAMMATICAL ERRORS such as confusing “it’s” and “its”. It’s=it is; its is a pronominal adjective and the two are NOT THE SAME!!!!! You will not confuse “to affect” and “to effect”. The first means to influence, the second to put into action. So….my expectation is that students coming out of the universities after a Masters degree write in perfect, grammatically correct English.