It's 2020: What is Accounting Today?

Based on the acceptance of the importance of clear definitions and concepts, we explore conventional definitions of accounting and chart their change and development. While accounting's definitions have evolved, they do not, in our view, adequately reflect accounting as social and moral practice but rather continue to position accounting as a technical practice, despite the valuable work of key accounting scholars particularly over the last four decades. We highlight the social and moral aspects of accounting and propose a new definition of accounting for the 2020s to stimulate discussion, debate and improvement. In our opinion, accounting has a way to go to reach its true potential.     

An emerging Korean youth culture,Rail-ro: the application of cultural consensus analysis to domestic rail travel experiences

This study deals with an emerging domestic rail travel phenomenon among Korean youth, known as Rail-ro (Railo), which has influenced aspects of youth culture and domestic tourism in Korea since 2007. The purpose of this study is to determine whether Railo experiences exist as a coherent culture among Railers based on cultural consensus analysis. The result indicates Railers’ strong agreement about Railo experiences, which reinforces the view that a particular rail pass could be instrumental in forming a distinct youth travel subculture. This study demonstrates how travel culture driven by the seasonal rail pass supports domestic tourism and inbound tourism.     

Economic performance in Latin America in the 2000s: recession,recovery, and resilience?

This paper examines Latin America’s economic performance in the last three decades with the objective of assessing whether it entered a new phase of strong and persistent growth with stabilization in the 2000s. Our analysis pays special attention to the changing roles of exports and investment as drivers of growth and to the region’s performance in the fiscal area, the composition and dynamics of foreign trade, investment and labour productivity. Our results indicate that, in general, the region has achieved important progress in macroeconomic matters, but it has failed to overcome major structural, long-term constraints linked to its balance of payments and to a lesser extent its fiscal performance. Unless these challenges are resolved, the region’s long-term growth will hardly be favourable.     

Corporate governance,external market discipline and firm productivity

Using a sample of Australian companies over the 2000–2005 period, we examine the impact of internal corporate governance on firm's total factor productivity, taking into account the interaction between internal governance and external market discipline. Our empirical findings point to a substitution effect between product market competitiveness and firm-level corporate governance. Overall, internal corporate governance mechanisms – more efficient boards and greater CEO stock-based compensation – are effective instruments for improving firm productivity. However, internal governance is less effective when a firm faces a highly competitive product market. We find only weak empirical support for an association between firm's ownership structure and productivity, and no support for an association between industry takeover intensity and firm productivity.     

Why do firms hold so much cash? A tax-based explanation

US corporations hold significant amounts of cash on their balance sheets. This paper develops and tests the hypothesis that the magnitude of US multinational cash holdings are, in part, a consequence of the tax costs associated with repatriating foreign income. Consistent with this hypothesis, firms facing higher repatriation taxes hold higher levels of cash, hold this cash abroad, and hold this cash in affiliates that trigger high tax costs when repatriating earnings. In addition, less financially constrained firms and those that are more technology intensive exhibit a higher sensitivity of affiliate cash holdings to repatriation tax burdens.     

Local Responses to Long-term Unemployment: Delivering Access to Employment in Edinburgh

This paper examines locally developed policy responses to long-term unemployment in the city of Edinburgh: a labour market characterised by relatively low-unemployment and generally high levels of demand. Drawing upon in-depth interviews with 115 long-term unemployed people residing in the city, the paper first analyses the complex combination of barriers to work faced by members of this client group. Two recent labour market initiatives, developed by the local authority in partnership with other public and third sector agencies and (in one case) major employers, are then discussed. It is suggested that this locally focused, partnership-based approach may provide a useful model for local policy responses to long-term unemployment, particularly in buoyant labour markets.     

Entrepreneurship as a solution to extreme poverty: A review and future research directions

Entrepreneurship is widely argued to be critical for alleviating extreme poverty. However, research on this topic is characterized by diverging perspectives regarding poverty alleviation and remains fragmented across various research domains. This review examines 77 leading academic journals over the period 1990 to 2017 and identifies over 200 articles on entrepreneurship and poverty alleviation. The analysis of these articles highlights three different underlying perspectives: poverty alleviation through entrepreneurship as remediation (actions that address immediate resource concerns), reform (actions leading to substantive institutional changes), and revolution (actions that change the underlying capitalist-based assumptions of business). The analysis of these articles leads to the development of extensive new insights and opportunities for future research.     

A multicultural retreat in exotic serenity: interpreting temple stay experience using the Mandala of Health model

Temple stay is a creative form of religious tourism in Korea that offers an authentic local experience at a Buddhist temple. This study is to describe the experiences of international participants during their overnight temple stay. Based on field research with in-depth interviews, this study result indicates that participants regarded temple stay as a multicultural retreat in a religious and therapeutic setting to promote their ultimate wellbeing. In the intersection of culture, religion, and tourism, this study offers a framework to understand the essence of temple stay experience to modern individuals based on the Mandala of Health model.     

DEMOGRAPHIC TRENDS AND CONSUMPTION INEQUALITY IN AUSTRALIA BETWEEN 1975 AND 1993

We examine trends in consumption inequality among Australian households using the Australian Bureau of Statistics Household Expenditure Surveys collected over the period 1975 to 1993. We find that the distribution of consumption is much more equal than that of income and that both income and consumption inequality rose by significant amounts over the period. However, consumption inequality rose by much less (the Gini coefficient for income inequality rose by 17 percent while that for nondurable consumption rose by 9 percent). We then examine the effects of demographic trends, specifically population aging and changing family structures, and find they account for only a minor fraction in the overall growth in economic inequality.     

Probability distributions for economic surplus changes: the case of technical change in the Australian wool industry

Mullen, Alston and Wohlgenant (1989) (MAW) examined the distribution of the benefits of technical change in the Australian wool industry. Their conclusions are revisited by examining the probability distributions of changes in the welfare measures, given uncertainty about their model parameters. Subjective probability distributions are specified for the parameters and correlations among some of the parameters are imposed. Hierarchical distributions are also used to model diverse views about the specification of the subjective distributions. A sensitivity elasticity is defined through the estimation of a response surface to measure the sensitivity of the estimated research benefits to individual parameters. MAW's conclusions are found to be robust under the stochastic approach to sensitivity analysis demonstrated in this article.