Frontiers of Non-Financial Performance Reporting in New Zealand

In 1989, legislation in New Zealand introduced requirements for non-financial performance information in the public sector to be reported and audited. This paper describes the initial responses of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of New Zealand and the Audit Office to this challenge and examines their further development following a decade of experience.     

GOVERNMENT SPENDING IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES: Trends, Causes, and Consequences

Throughout the twentieth century governments have been spendingever larger proportions of national income. Three issues arisein discussions about the growth of such spending as it pertainsto developing countries: How does it compare with expenditurein industrial nations? What explains the growth in spendingby developing country governments? And what are the effectson economic growth? Government expenditure as a share of GDPin low- and middle-income countries, on average, is lower thancomparable shares in industrial market economies and, with fewexceptions, is growing. Many factors, including ideology, demographics,a positive income elasticity for public goods, the rising costof public goods relative to private goods, and perhaps developmenttheory and practice, explain this growth. As for the relationshipbetween government expenditure and economic growth, the empiricalevidence does not reveal any strong correlation. The size ofgovernment may engender strong ideological debate, but the positionthat the aggregate level of government expenditure is a significantdeterminant of growth rates receives little support.      

Can absence make a team grow stronger?

Some projects have such diverse requirements that they need a variety of specialists to work on them. But often the best-qualified specialists are scattered around the globe, perhaps at several companies. Remarkably, an extensive benchmarking study reveals, it isn't necessary to bring team members together to get their best work. In fact, they can be even more productive if they stay separated and do all their collaborating virtually. The scores of successful virtual teams the authors examined didn't have many of the psychological and practical obstacles that plagued their more traditional, face-to-face counterparts. Team members felt freer to contribute--especially outside their established areas of expertise. The fact that such groups could not assemble easily actually made their projects go faster, as people did not wait for meetings to make decisions, and individuals, in the comfort of their own offices, had full access to their files and the complementary knowledge of their local colleagues. Reaping those advantages, though, demanded shrewd management of a virtual team's work processes and social dynamics. Rather than depend on videoconferencing or e-mail, which could be unwieldy or exclusionary, successful virtual teams made extensive use of sophisticated online team rooms, where everyone could easily see the state of the work in progress, talk about the work in ongoing threaded discussions, and be reminded of decisions, rationales, and commitments. Differences were most effectively hashed out in tele-conferences, which team leaders also used to foster group identity and solidarity. When carefully managed in this way, the clash of perspectives led not to acrimony but, rather, to fundamental solutions, turning distance and diversity into competitive advantage.     

Behavioral health benefits: key to a healthy workforce

Mental disorders exact a heavier toll on workplace productivity than do physical illnesses, but a complete behavioral health program is often looked upon as just one more driver of rate increases. Properly understood, promoted and utilized, however, behavioral health benefits can contribute to decreased absenteeism and increased productivity, and even help offset the treatment costs of medical disorders.     

Attribute differences between U.S. GAAP and IFRS earnings: An exploratory study

In this study we explore attribute differences between U.S. GAAP and IFRS earnings. Our study is motivated by the ongoing harmonization process in accounting standard setting as well as by recent convergence projects by the FASB and the IASB. We test two market-based earnings attributes, i.e., value relevance and timeliness, as well as two accounting-based earnings attributes, i.e., predictability and accrual quality. These attributes are tested for German New Market firms as they are allowed to choose between IFRS and U.S. GAAP for financial reporting purposes. Overall, we find that U.S. GAAP and IFRS only differ with regard to predictive ability. The fact that U.S. GAAP accounting information outperforms IFRS also holds after controlling for differences in firm characteristics, such as size, leverage and the audit firm. However, our results also seem to suggest that these differences are not fully valued by investors, as we do not observe significant and consistent differences for the value-relevance attribute.     

The role of organisational concern for workplace fairness in the choice of a performance measurement system

Prior studies linking performance management systems (PMS) and organisational justice have examined how PMS influence procedural fairness. Our investigation differs from these studies. First, it examines fairness as an antecedent (instead of as a consequence) of the choice of PMS. Second, instead of conceptualising organisational fairness as procedural fairness, it relies on the impression management interpretation of organisational fairness. Hence, the study investigates how the need of senior managers to cultivate an impression of being fair is related to the choice of PMS systems and employee outcomes. Based on a sample of 276 employees, the results indicate that the need of senior management to cultivate an impression of being fair is associated with employee performance. They also indicate that a substantial component of these effects is indirect through the choice of comprehensive performance measures (CPM) and employee job satisfaction. These findings highlight the importance of organisational concern for workplace fairness as an antecedent of choice of CPM. From a theoretical perspective, the adoption of the impression management interpretation of organisational fairness contributes by providing new insights into the relationship between fairness and choice of PMS from a perspective that is different from those used in prior management accounting research.     

The Training of Economics Teachers in England and Wales

Whitehead describes in some detail differences between British and U.S. economic education with respect to both the rigor of the precollege curriculum and the training of teachers. Perhaps his article will serve as a challege to American educators as well as provoke a definitive study of the relative effectiveness of the two educational systems.