National Accounting, Government Budgeting and the Accounting Discipline

National accounting and government budgeting include two kinds of financial reporting that are not influenced by, but have an increasing influence on, the accounting discipline. The government budget has changed, over the last sixty years, from a financial statement that was recognisably part of the accounting discipline to one in which national accounting and government budgeting have the dominant influence. There were early attempts to reconcile national accounting and the discipline but these have largely disappeared. Although the three forms of accounting measure the same phenomena, each is different in fundamental ways, in terms of both relevance and reliability.