The New Zealand (NZ) Government began its public sector reforms in 1984. The purposes of the reforms were to build a more open public sector, a plainer and clearer way of reporting, emphasising accountability and transparency (Wallace, 1993). A central focus of the reforms was to change the...

The European Union (EU) is constructed under the federalist principle of subsidiarity, which this paper con-siders in the policy field of financial reporting. We attempt to answer the question whether the current governance level of accounting regulation in Europe is balanced between centralised...

Local governments on the municipal level were among the first organizations to take part in the accounting reform in Greece that sought the transformation of the traditional budgetary cash accounting system to a new system that combines cash and accrual accounting information. In this paper we...

In order to improve the organizational performance of governmental entities, there has been a tendency in many countries to introduce management reforms that are believed to prevail in private companies. The term 'NPM' (New Public Management) was coined to label these reforms. NPM stresses -...

Since we can safely say about Romania that it had to go through a long process of transformation until the European Union member state stage, we can also state that the Romanian public accounting system has suffered multiple changes in order to match the level of the European accounting system,...

Using data from Ontario hospitals, we investigate the conjecture that the stickiness of costs would be greater for functions that relate to an organization's core competency. We find operating costs for the hospital as a whole are sticky. Moreover, we find higher stickiness in costs pertaining...

Although management accounting innovations such as Activity-Based Costing, the Balanced Scorecard and benchmarking have received much academic interest in recent years, our understanding of why some organizations adopt and implement such new management accounting systems (MAS) and others do not,...

The purpose of this paper is to study the institutional logics of how and why two case units in the Finnish Defence Forces have reacted differently to external pressures originating from the State Audit Office to change their management accounting systems. The situation is made complex due to...

Although some efforts have been made over the last 20 years, governmental capital assets are still the subject of many unresolved questions. This paper first presents an overview of the current differing accounting standards or research efforts with respect to governmental capital assets and...

The paper investigates information content of net income, other comprehensive income items, and pseudo comprehensive income for Japanese firms. The relative information content test demonstrates net income is one of the most dominant income measures, and the incremental information content test...