Q37(ii) Sept 2018

[rlsrachaellouisesmith]

Discuss the problems the government faces in its attempt to achieve its
macroeconomic objectives of high economic growth, full employment and low
inflation.

The question asks to discuss the problems government faces in its attempt to achieve its macroeconomic objectives.

The examiners report details very few problems, other than the fact that the 4 objectives conflict with each other.

I focused on how the government attempts to achieve its aims through fiscal and monetary policy and the problems it faces when using these attempts.

How do I know this is not what the question wants?

It in fact seems to want a discussion on how the macroeconomic objectives are related...

 

[Richie Holway]

Hi Rachel,

Good question - it is difficult to understand exactly what is being tested with some of these longer answer questions. For a question like this, if the examiner was testing the limitations of the various types of government policy (fiscal, monetary etc), I'd expect to see greater emphasis on those types of policy using the words in the question. For example, we have seen questions before along the lines of:

• 'Discuss the problems that expansionary fiscal and monetary policies might bring...', and
• 'Discuss the effectiveness of monetary and fiscal policy...', and
• 'Discuss the advantages, disadvantages and potential problems associated with using fiscal policy and monetary policy...'

Or, they could have perhaps asked you to first describe how the government attempts to achieve its objectives... (which would have been a prompt to talk through how the different policies work, followed by, ...and discuss the problems associated with the use of such policies (which would have been a prompt to talk through the problems of each).

The emphasis of the words in the question you mention above, however, is more on the objectives themselves, as opposed to the policies (so much so that the question actually states each of the objectives). This is our prompt to focus our answer on those objectives, and why there are difficulties in achieving all of them, irrelevant of the exact type of policy used. A good discussion as to what the conflicts are and why the conflicts exist would score well, as it is those conflicts that do cause the government problems when trying to meet their objectives.

Thanks
Richie