The Evolution of Bookkeeping in China: Integrating Historical Trends with Western Influences

This article reviews the development of Chinese single-entry bookkeeping, the emergence of Chinese double-entry bookkeeping and evolutionary trends from single entry to double entry. It identifies the invention and basic nature of Chinese double-entry methods which have reflected cultural changes from within the society. Given this historical perspective, conclusions are drawn about the nature of social and economic change in China and the impact of outside cultural influences. Of particular importance to the timing of progress is the primitive form of double entry entitled Three Feet. This had its gestation about the same time as European innovations were occurring in response to economic and cultural changes which sponsored bookkeeping methods as described by Pacioli. A critical question for examination at present is whether cultural evolution in China can yet support complete integration of its own accounting principles and fundamental philosophies with Western accounting methods. This has proved to be difficult in the past.     

The Certified Public Accounting Profession in China: Its Development and Impact on Financial Control of Business Operations

Accounting reforms leading towards the internationalisation of Chinese accounting practices are being accelerated by the development of the certified public accountants (CPA) system, re-introduced in China in 1980. The impact of the Chinese CPA system on foreign CPAs attempting to enter the Chinese CPA profession points to issues of concern for Western business people as a whole. There is considerable potential for conflict between the traditional independence of the CPA profession in western countries and the Chinese acceptance of control by powerful government agencies.     

Choice of translation methods in financial disclosure: a test of compliance with environmental hypotheses

Despite successive professional pronouncements providing managers with scope to choose between two translation methods, the proportion of firms in Australia using the current method as compared to the temporal method has remained relatively constant over time. Here, use is made of environmental contingency variables to evaluate and explain the consistency of management's adoption of translation methods for foreign financial statements. Tests of the affects of significant operating environmental conditions as on-going constraints on management's decisions and actions do not support hypotheses that choice is usually opportunistic, conservative, deceptive or unnecessarily short-run, given management's risk planning process as a whole. On the basis of the statistical evidence presented, the adoption of particular translation methods can apparently reflect a parent company's broad on-going investment and operating strategies for the organisation as a whole.     

Pollution Abatement and Productivity Growth: Evidence from Germany,Japan, the Netherlands,and the United States

The passage of environmental legislation was accompanied by concerns about its potential detrimental effect on productivity. We assume inputs can be assigned to either abatement activities or good output production. This allows us to specify regulated and unregulated production frontiers to determine the association between pollution abatement and productivity growth. We then employ our “assigned input” model to determine the association between productivity and abatement activities for manufacturing industries in Germany, Japan, the Netherlands and the United States.     

A bilingual group decision support system

Bilingual meetings have always been relatively inefficient due to the necessity for human translators to interpret comments as they are made. Even meetings in which participants know some of the other language’s vocabulary are burdened by the necessity to translate. Until now, bilingual meetings have been conducted verbally with human translation. Here, we describe a computer-based system which allows participants to communicate simultaneously and anonymously while the system provides translations automatically. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

AAS 29 And Public-Sector Reporting: Unresolved Issues

The latest Australian accounting standard on public-sector accounting (AAS 29) requires government departments at all levels to comply with private-sector accounting and reporting principles and standards. But this commercially oriented framework may appear alien to departmental managers and may not accommodate many of the unique characteristics of departmental financial accountability. The underlying concepts and terms which take their meaning from the commercial world of profit-driven markets may be misunderstood, misinterpreted or lead to unintended welfare and distributional consequences. This article examines some of the underlying terms that may be misinterpreted and the possible consequences of their operation in the departmental context.     

Accounting for Infrastructure Service Delivery by Government: Generational Issues

Infrastructure service provision by government creates huge distributional issues about service availability and performance over time and the relative funding burdens borne by successive generations of consumers across time. But providing financial disclosure on these issues through inter-generational accounting pre-supposes that accounting measurement is both generationally neutral (temporal neutrality) and does not legitimate any particular pattern of distribution. At the very least, accounting measurements of service provision costs should possess the attribute of distributional fairness. They should not bias the inter-generational allocation of cost or funding burdens. We argue that the forced application of inappropriate commercial accounting concepts of asset valuation, depreciation and capital maintenance does produce significant generational bias. More flexibility is required to produce the necessary accounting measurement attributes for financial disclosure on whether government has discharged its continuing accountability for inter-generational equity in burden sharing. We discuss three conceptual issues and illustrate the need for flexibility by proposing an alternative 'flow of obligations' approach which does not require reference to valuations of community service resources or arbitrary cost allocations under depreciation.     

Anti-Corporate Farming Laws and Industry Structure: The Case of Cattle Feeding

Nine midwestern states have laws that restrict the involvement of publicly held corporations in agriculture. Opponents argue that the laws' direct efforts to regulate ownership structure may have an adverse indirect impact on size structure. Restricting corporate involvement might stifle the emergence and growth of efficient, large-scale establishments if corporations have advantages over other organizational forms in meeting capital requirements. Since 1982, Nebraska has had an anti-corporate farming law that prohibits corporate ownership of feedlots. We test whether the implementation of the Nebraska law had an impact on the stochastic process governing the evolution of the state's feedlot size distribution.     

Adjusting the measurement of US manufacturing productivity for air pollution emissions control

We estimate a distance function and derive producer shadow prices for SO₂ and PM-10 emissions. The shadow prices are used to adjust a traditional measure of total factor productivity growth in order to account for the reallocation of inputs from production of the marketed output to pollution abatement activities. Adjusted total factor productivity growth rates are calculated for the two-digit SIC manufacturing industries in the United States for 1970–1996. The results indicate that including the “output” of pollution abatement activities has a measurable effect on the productivity of many industries in the manufacturing sector.