Accounting for reserves

Views on the effectiveness of sterilized reserve intervention vary. Sterilized intervention is generally seen as ineffective in advanced countries while persistent intervention by some emerging markets is often cited as contributing to undervalued exchange rates and current account surpluses. This paper argues that capital controls reconcile these views. We find strong and highly robust evidence that sterilized intervention is fully offset by outflows of private money in countries without controls, while controls partially block this offset. For a country with extensive capital controls, every dollar in additional reserves increases the current account by some 50–100 cents. This is mainly offset by an opposite adjustment in the current account of the United States—the dominant reserve currency issuer with the deepest and most liquid bond markets—with a smaller diversion to emerging markets.     

Accounting for Foucault

Michel Foucault's concept of governmentality has been central to critical accounting research for two decades, a centrality that has placed systems of calculation as the starting point of discussions of the state, the firm and the market. We begin by outlining the development of governmentality in Foucault's own work. Despite the rich, productive nature of the concept, Foucault was careful to define governmentality as broadly and loosely as possible, the better to convey its open-endedness. The second section considers the introduction of Foucault to accounting research. The combination of Foucault and accounting history is not at all obvious, but became possible because a series of important contextual studies demonstrated that accounting history had to consider both the historicity of the profession and that its practices were vital in constructing measures of organisational performance, not simply uncovering previously obscure or hidden social realities. Moreover, accounting history studies the production of targets and measures of progress towards utility and welfare, processes that are not reducible to the firm or even to economic calculation. Our third section outlines the genesis of the ‘London School of governmentality’ and the main strands of their theoretical contribution. Finally, we examine the governmentalists’ analysis of corporate restructuring and the introduction of new production organisation by Caterpillar. Our aim is to use the Caterpillar case as the vehicle for a broader consideration of governmentality, strategy and the enterprise.     

会计师行业如何应对中国加入WTO

中国经济正由出口导向性转向消费主导型,加入WTO必然会使其贸易、投资和商业行为发生很多变化.不少行业的进口限制将逐步放宽,营造有利于外商投资以至市场竞争的环境.与此同时,国内企业也必须急起应对,迎接新的挑战,否则就可能失去市场占有率.     

会计实务问题(一)——资产核算

为促进注册会计师业务知识与技术的学习,我刊新设“业务讲座”栏目。本期开始,先约请浙江天健会计师事务所主任会计师胡少先根据现行会计制度、会计准则规定的基本精神,参照国际惯例,对若干会计实务问题的处理进行了分析,并提出处理建议,供行业同人参考。     

Accounting for employee flows

This paper examines employee flows and the association with firm earnings and interest rates. We use administrative employer–employee matched panel data from Denmark spanning 17 years and hence exploit actual data on employee arrivals (labor inflows) and departures (labor outflows). Three main findings emerge. First, we condition by firms’ economic conditions. Departures predict earnings increases for prior-year loss firms, while they predict earnings decreases for prior-year profit firms, suggesting that this conditioning can help explain the mixed results in the literature. Arrivals predict earnings increases, though only for prior-year profit firms. These effects are stronger for high-paid employees than for low-paid ones. Second, the effects of departures are generally larger than the effects of arrivals, consistent with departures disrupting operations. Third, we find that lenders price employee flow information but only for departures of high-paid employees, despite the predictive ability of the flow of other employees for future earnings. Overall our results suggest that employee flows predict firm financial performance but are only partially priced by lenders.     

Accounting for Intangible Investments

The traditional categorisation of expenditures evident in many firms' charts of accounts and financial statements does not identify and measure expenditures on intangible investment separately from tangible investment and operating expenditures. This contrasts with the accounting for tangible investment, which separately accounts for all expenditures as assets unless the future benefits are consumed in a single accounting period. Further, in searching for better ways to account for intangibles, regulators and researchers have focused on the accounting choice problem relating to the existence and recognisability of intangible assets. In this paper, we argue that identifying and separately reporting the expenditures on intangible investment is the logical first step in accounting for intangible investments. Learning about the firm's categories of value driving (and sometimes potentially value destroying) expenditures has important implications for understanding aspects of the value chain, performance measurement, valuation, corporate governance and the external audit.     

Accounting for digital currencies

The purpose of this paper is twofold: (i) to investigate some of the main issues surrounding the classification of digital currencies, and (ii) to identify the accounting practices and standards tied to digital currencies. This paper discusses two different types of digital currencies, including: central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) and privately issued cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin. The findings of this study suggest that current accounting standards do not precisely cover the accounting treatment of digital currencies, even though the estimated value of market capitalisation of cryptocurrency in 2022 was USD 200 billion. This conceptual paper identifies the imminent need for an accounting standard to provide guidance on the identification, classification, measurement, and presentation of digital currencies. In the interim, existing accounting standards can be amended to incorporate digital currencies to avoid inconsistent global accounting approaches.     

Accounting for Foreign Business

The currency translation problem is the same in kind as the inflation accounting problem. No demonstrable connection may be made between financial information and evaluation or choice unless the components of the information are derived uniformly in a dated setting. Proposals hitherto suffer in different degrees from heterotemporal aggregation and cross-temporal translation. By recourse to four examples of different relations between an investor company and foreign investees, an integral method is described for dealing with foreign transactions and investments, where prices and inflation rates are different and exchange rates may vary. The essence of the process is that the components of financial statements shall be made to correspond with their factual or factually based features from time to time.     

Accounting for public space

How is accounting implicated in the ordering of public space? Starting from the assumption that public space is that portion of an institutional field where, in part because of the participation of the media, there is relatively more openness in the flow of information and in the ability of field participants to engage in public discussion and debate, the study examines the relationship between accounting and public space in the context of educational reforms in Alberta, Canada. Using a variety of archival, conversational, interview and focus group data as well as the theoretical insights of Bourdieu and Foucault, the analysis highlights how the financial and accountability mechanisms used by the provincial government as part of its reform initiatives facilitated changes in the types and amounts of capital of certain field participants, encouraged the partitioning of generic social groupings such as parents and academic labour into more finely distinguished social groupings, and introduced new ways of saying and doing into the field. While these accounting and accountability changes were constraining on certain field participants they were also productive in that the new flows of accounting information created new opportunities within the field for certain field participants.     

《内部会计控制规范》:新形势下加强单位内部会计监督的里程碑

《内部会计控制规范》作为《会计法》的配套规章 ,是解决当前一些单位内部管理松弛、控制弱化的重要举措 ,是从源头上治理腐败的一项制度安排 ,是适应我国加入WTO的客观要求 ,是新形势下加强单位内部会计监督的里程碑。本文论述了《内部会计控制规范》的制定背景、总体思路、形成过程和主要内容 ,并就内部控制与内部会计控制的关系、内部会计控制规范与其他相关会计法规的关系、内部会计控制规范的试行等问题作了说明。     

养老金会计处理的探讨

人口老龄化趋势已成为全球性的问题 ,世界各国一直在不断努力寻求解决的途径 ,至今已形成了各具特色的养老保险制度。在会计处理上 ,西方国家已形成一套比较完善的体系 ,而我国在这方面尚处于探索阶段。本文分析了养老金的性质及养老金会计核算的原则 ;借鉴西方 (主要是美国和IASC)养老金会计领域的研究成果 ,分别就两种养老金给付方式下的会计处理进行论述 ;结合我国养老金制度发展的实际情况 ,对养老金计划及会计问题进行初步探讨。     

Accounting for a Sustainable Scotland

Sustainable development indicators (SDI) can define priorities, determine sustainable actions, evaluate policy options and legitimate government interventions. Sustainable development strategies and indicators used in Scotland, however, show a lack of consistency with a potential for distortion of performance. The attributes of a sustainable Scotland are used to construct a model to develop strategies and indicator sets for sustainable development.