THE ROLE OF ACCOUNTING IN ORGANISATIONAL CHANGE: PROMOTING PERFORMANCE IMPROVEMENTS IN THE PRIVATISED UK WATER INDUSTRY

Privatisation has been one of the most important and controversial policy initiatives to emerge in the U.K. over the last decade. Yet despite its prominence, little so far is known about its impact on those centrally involved in its implementations: senior management. This paper will investigate the ways in which senior management within one of the major privatised industries, the Water Industry, have sought to give effect to the strategic change involved in the transformation of a public sector Water Authority into a private sector Water plc. Although the monopoly character of the supply of Water services has remained intact, managers in the new Water plcs have had to respond to new expectations and assessments of corporate performance from shareholders, investors and financial analysts; from customers; and from a new economic regulatory regime operated by the Director General of the Office of Water Services. The Director General, in addition to operating price controls, is committed to developing “yardstick” competition which will provide the opportunity to make comparative judgements about performance levels achieved by each of the new Water plcs. In pursuit of improvements in efficiency and profitability, senior managers have engineered a variety of restructurings of corporate organisation to give more focus to achieving new business objectives, and to move away from a public sector bureaucratic management style with its traditional tall-pyramid structure to flatter and less hierarchical management structures. Although many of the changes have been justified in terms of empowerment and providing more autonomy for local managers, the paper argues that the experience of change for these managers has largely consisted of being subjected to much greater accountability for their performance through greater emphasis on the achievement of financial targets, more systematic monitoring of performance, the introduction of individual performance appraisal, and performance-related pay. Central to this intensification of the scrutiny of performance have been changes in accounting information systems and how they are used. In examining how these changes have functioned in their organisational context, the paper seeks to contribute to an understanding of the role of accounting in processes of organisational change     

The diffusion of management accounting innovations in the public sector: a research agenda

There have been numerous studies of the transformation of the public sector. This paper has a different focus: the dissemination and adoption of management accounting practices within the new public sector. The aim of the paper is explore the manner and means of diffusion, the obstacles to adoption and to establish a research agenda. The paper discusses findings of a survey on diffusion sent to public sector financial managers. The results of the survey indicate, inter alia, that adoption of accounting innovations by public sector organisations is largely affected by government influence. This study has interesting findings, but also points to the need for a new research agenda on the diffusion of management accounting practices in the public sector.     

Simultaneous Public and Private Provision of Services, Asymmetric Information and Innovation

Public and private provision of a service coexist. There is asymmetric information between the government and the agency providing the public service with respect to the costs, the quality of the service and the innovation effort of the agency. We examine the optimal government design of the funding contracts to induce the agency to reveal its costs and exert high innovation effort. The optimizing behaviour of consumers and private firms generates observable information, which can be used by the government to reduce its information problem. In the optimal contracts, the informational rents of the agency increase with the level of innovation effort that the government induces from the agency. Correlation between public and the private sector costs results in a trade-off in the government's policy between inducing innovation and extracting the informational rent of the agency. To increase the redistribution inherent in the public provision of the service, the government will manipulate the expected profits of the private firms to induce higher innovation effort.     

FREE CASH FLOW AND PUBLIC GOVERNANCE: THE CASE OF ALASKA

In a widely cited 1986 article in the American Economic Review, Michael Jensen gave the concept of free cash flow (FCF) a new twist by redefining it as cash flow in excess of that required to fund all projects with positive net present values. Put another way, FCF represents funds available in the firm that managers may choose to hold as idle cash, return to shareholders, or invest in projects with returns below the firm's cost of capital. In redefining FCF in this way, Jensen converted FCF from a measure of economic income and value into a measure of corporate assets available for discretionary, and potentially value‐destroying, use by firm managers. And, as he argued in his important article, managers in mature businesses with substantial free cash flow have a tendency to destroy value by plowing too much capital back into those businesses or, often worse, making ill‐advised acquisitions in unrelated businesses. Several methods have been developed in financial markets and internal corporate governance systems to discourage managers from wasting FCF. Better monitoring by boards of directors, large ownership blocks, and properly aligned management compensation contracts are all parts of the solution. And the extraordinary increase in stock repurchases in recent years, invariably applauded by investors, is another illustration of the market's success in encouraging companies to address their free cash flow problems. But if the “FCF problem” of the private sector has attracted considerable attention from finance scholars, the problem is even more acute in the public sector, where FCF can be thought of as tax revenue in excess of what is required to finance well‐defined and generally accepted levels of public services. Unlike the private sector, in the public sector there are neither measures nor mechanisms by which to monitor and constrain wasteful spending by elected officials. In this article, the authors attempt to measure the costs to taxpayers of government FCF using the case of Alaska, which since 1969 has received a huge windfall of tax revenue from North Slope oil leases. After examining the state's public finances from 1968 through 1993, the authors offer $25 billion as a conservative estimate of the social losses from Alaska's waste of free cash flow during that 25‐year period.     

Monetary and financial stability: Here to stay?

We argue that changes in the monetary and financial regimes over the last twenty years or so have been subtly altering the dynamics of the economy and hence the challenges that monetary and prudential authorities face. In particular, the current environment may be more vulnerable to the occasional build up of financial imbalances, i.e. over-extensions in (private sector) balance sheets, which herald economic weakness and unwelcome disinflation down the road, as they unwind. As a result, achieving simultaneous monetary and financial stability in a lasting way may call for refinements to current monetary and prudential policy frameworks. These refinements would entail a firmer long-term focus, greater symmetry in policy responses between upswings and downswings, with greater attention to actions during upswings, and closer coordination between monetary and prudential authorities.     

Government and managerial influence on auditor switching under partial privatization

We investigate how auditor switching is affected by government influence, misalignment between type of auditor (government vs. private) and type of controlling shareholder (government vs. private), and misalignment between an incumbent auditor and imputed preferences of managers in a market characterized by continued substantial government ownership in listed entities. We exploit a natural policy and regulatory experiment in Iran that allows us to investigate what happens when previously government-owned entities are partially privatized as listed entities where, in many cases, the government retains significant ownership interests. At the same time, there were significant changes in the audit market, resulting in large increases in the number of private sector auditors competing for previously state-administered audits. We find the likelihood of auditor switches is strongly associated with measures of misalignment between type of auditor and type of controlling shareholder and auditor–managerial misalignment, but these associations are constrained by significant government influence. Exposing the constraining effect of significant government influence on auditor switching is an important contribution to our understanding of privatizations, government shareholder influence and auditor choice. These results have implications for policy development in other emerging and transition economies where privatization remains largely partial, and competition among private sector auditors is still emergent.     

LOCAL GOVERNMENTS,UNEXPECTED DEPRECIATION AND FINANCIAL PERFORMANCE ADJUSTMENT

Prior management and manipulation of financial accounting information research has overwhelmingly been focused within a private sector setting. This study adopts a public sector focus in empirically examining the use of a specific discretionary accrual (i.e., depreciation) to adjust the financial performance of New South Wales (Australia) local governments. Findings indicate a significant positive association between absolute unexpected depreciation and absolute local government income before capital contributions, and a significant positive association between absolute unexpected depreciation and capital contributions. Overall, the results make significant contributions to various literature streams with implications for various stakeholders interested in local governmental financial performance.     

DONORS, IDEOLOGUES, AND BUREAUCRATS: GOVERNMENT OBJECTIVES AND THE PERFORMANCE OF THE NONPROFIT SECTOR

Ideologically driven managers of non profits prefer to deal with donors whose ideologies match their own. Bureaucratic managers prefer to control large organizations. In this paper, we model the goverment's interest in nonprofit service provision and how it leads goverment toprefer larger firms then pure ideologues will choose, and smaller firms then pure bureaucrates choose. We explore the effect of population growth on the optimal than pure bureaucrates choose. We explore the effects of population growth on the optimal size of nonprofit organizations from the goverment's point of view, and review policy tools available to goverment to influence the attrictiveness of the nonprofit sector to managers with varying degrees of ideological and beureaucratic motivation.     

社区银行发展的经济学分析与路径选择

社区银行是一种充满生命力的经营模式.从发达国家的实践来看,社区银行的蓬勃发展得益于正确的市场定位、明晰的产权结构、强力的政策扶持以及有序的金融监管.从经济学上看,这一模式的存在是源于金融专业化分工的客观要求、在特定的领域拥有信息和交易成本的比较优势.建立一个覆盖城乡的社区银行体系能够弱化我国经济发展中典型的二元经济结构.结合我国国情,社区银行的发展路径包括:改造现存的部分地方中小银行,由民营资本组建新的社区银行,将民间金融组织引导规范成社区银行.此外,社区银行的有效运行还需要建立健全法律体系、建立存款保险制度等配套措施.     

Agenda for a new monetary reform

The thrust of this article is that once more the time has come for a broad debate on domestic and international monetary order and on the role and the rules governing the functioning of financial markets in the modern market economy. We have to define an agenda and seek a consensus for a new monetary reform that will take into account both the positive and negative lessons learned from more than twenty years of experience with liberalization, deregulation and privatization in the financial sector, with flexible exchange rates and international monetary instability. In today's world economy there is an especially dangerous contrast between, on the one hand virtually total globalization of financial markets, and the fixation of monetary policy on narrow national objectives on the other hand. The article lists eight major items that ought to be considered in this debate: (1) the adoption of common rules necessary in a global market economy, (2) the need to return to a true international monetary order, (3) redefining and strengthening the role of central banks, (4) examining the dangers of a primarily short-term finance driven globalization, (5) extending the scope of the concept of price instability beyond the domestic price index, (6) dealing with the problem of artificial risk creation in financial markets and establish a more equitable distribution of the costs of risks, (7) reconsider the current distribution between earning on financial assets and other income and counteract the deflationary bias in the current system, (8) redefine monetary and financial order that is compatible with modern information technologies, rather than lagging behind the information revolution. The article does not offer set solutions for all these issues. Its conclusion is, however, that without such a debate and a consensus on a balanced new approach, there is a real threat of a backlash, the threat of losing the advantages of liberalization and globalization and of a return to increased monetary and economic nationalism and to excessive government intervention and control.     

REFORMING FINANCE IN TRANSITIONAL SOCIALIST ECONOMIES

Financial reforms initiated in most transitional socialist economiesdo not yet adequately provide many of the financial servicesassociated with market-oriented financial systems. Such services—mobilizingresources, selecting firms and allocating capital, monitoringfirm managers, and facilitating the management of transactionsand risk—are a necessary condition for economic reformto improve living standards. This article envisages four central strategies to guide reformof the financial sector: • Building an infrastructure based on clear and enforceableproperty rights, modern accounting and auditing standards, reliablepayments systems, sound prudential and enforcement regulations,and professionals trained in finance • Ending the shell game of trying to hide the losses ofstate-owned enterprises, and separating government decisionsto finance "priority" firms from the allocation decisions ofindependent financial institutions • Privatizing some financial institutions early—althoughnot necessarily precipitously—in concert with the privatizationof firms and supervisory capabilities, meanwhile cleaning upbank loans to maximize the chances that firms and banks willsucceed as private entities • Improving the tax system and stressing a prudent interestrate policy to reduce uncertainty, distortions, and excessiverepression of the financial sector.      

How Purchasing Decisions are Made in the Mixed Economy of Community Care

Under the 'Community Care' programme, English local authorities have become responsible for assessing the needs of those affected by problems associated with ageing, mental illness, learning difficulties or physical disability. They also have the responsibility of designing a suitable package of care for the individual, and for purchasing that care from a range of statutory, voluntary and private providers. This paper focuses on how purchasing decisions in community care are made. Concepts such as trust and reputation are found to be very important, and the paper therefore argues that the new economic sociology offers a more appropriate theoretical framework for examining the new market than the conventional neoclassical critique.     

Discretionary write-downs,write-offs,and other restructuring provisions: a signaling approach

This paper introduces a model seeking to explain the discretionary write-downs, write-offs, and other restructuring provisions reported by managers. The model comprises a firm, a manager, and a financial market. The firm is about to be restructured. The manager has some private information about the likelihood of success of his restructuring action. The manager may recognise all or part of the expenditure associated with his future restructuring action by reporting a discretionary restructuring provision. The manager chooses whether or not to report a provision, recognising the impact of the provision on his compensation. The paper shows how, under certain conditions, the manager may credibly communicate his private information to investors through his provision policy. Testable implications are consistent with the empirical evidence reported by Strong and Meyer (1987), Elliott and Shaw (1988), and Zucca and Campbell (1992).     

印美医疗保障体系私有化比较

美国和印度都是医疗保障体系高度私有化的国家,对我国未来医疗保障适度私有化之路具有借鉴意义。通过梳理和比较,本文得出印美医疗保障体系私有化的3个异同点:(1)政府责任定位:印度政府的目标是建立初级保健水平的全民医疗,美国政府则给予弱势群体较好的医疗保障;(2)私营医疗保障体系结构:美国的非营利、营利和公立医疗机构三足鼎立,印度的营利机构占有重要地位,而非营利机构比重甚至低于公立医院;(3)公私合作意愿:印度医疗服务提供方面公私合作意愿强,美国意愿相对较弱。     

Private sector share of external debt and financial stability: Evidence from bank loans

In the last two decades, the private sector has contracted a substantially larger share in the total amount of foreign-currency international debt (private sector share of external debt), especially in developing countries. In this paper, I empirically examine the effect of this phenomenon on bank loan prices. I find that the private sector share of external debt negatively and significantly impacts the price of bank loans. This result supports the hypothesis that private sector debt contributes to international financial stability to a greater degree than sovereign debt. Nevertheless, this impact is canceled out in the presence of fixed exchange regimes that are unsuitable with respect to fundamentals. In such circumstances, the private sector may take advantage of capital market distortions that are maintained by official authorities and thus exposes the country to further financial instability. Additional results corroborate the observation that the gain in financial stability stems from more efficient use of funds and reduced monitoring costs.     

Sustainable technologies and the innovation–regulation paradox

This article examines the paradox between innovation and regulation and its implication for the adoption of sustainable technologies in the domestic sector of the construction industry. The case of UK is examined, where progress towards the inclusion of social and environmental considerations has been slow. Recent change in attitude in the private sector, combined with government initiatives, has prompted a more sustainable agenda in construction. With significant reductions in greenhouse gas emissions required to meet climate change targets, the case for a particular energy-saving technology—natural thermal insulation materials for cavity wall insulation—suitable for widespread use in residential buildings, is assessed. In addition to the inherent conservatism in the construction industry, additional barriers inhibiting the uptake of new sustainable thermal insulation technologies include capital costs, the failure of the market to account for social and environmental costs and savings and their perceived cost-effectiveness and performance over a 50-year lifetime. Policy implications are drawn from the analysis.     

民间资本进入金融领域的影响因素分析

民间资本进入金融领域的行为是投资条件、投资意愿和投资行动三者的加总,经济发展、政府政策、资金需求的存在昭示着投资条件的是否具备,信用状况、投资收益率和投资风险则决定投资意愿,这些因素都在直接或间接、或大或小的影响着投资忠诚度和投资额度,其中信用环境、资金需求、政府政策支持力度以及投资期限是民间资本通过人人贷进行正规借贷的主要影响因素。因此民间借贷的正规化有赖于风险防范体系和中小企业直接融资平台的完善,以及政府的扶持。     

A critical financial analysis of the Private Finance Initiative: selecting a financing method or allocating economic wealth?

The UK government’s Private Finance Initiative (PFI) policy raises a series of questions about the rationality and distributive implications of using private finance, inevitably more expensive than public finance, in essential public services. This paper, by examining the process, the financial methodology, its assumptions and the data used in the system of appraisal for new hospital builds under PFI, shows that the decisions rested upon the ambiguous concepts of risk transfer and value for money at the level of the individual hospital rather than the system or society as a whole. These concepts were far from neutral and provided the rationalising motif for a process that transfers resources from the public at large to the financial elite, thereby obscuring the distribution issues that were largely missing from the policy debate.