Commentary: Financial Reporting and Financial Stability: Causes and Effects

Distinguished academics at a panel session of the American Accounting Association meeting in Denver in August 2011 discussed the relationship between financial reporting and financial stability. While accounting has been blamed for causing financial crises, the panellists noted that the evidence for this claim, particularly in relation to the recent financial crisis, seems to be missing. It is possible that accounting has an amplifying effect on crises, but even on this point the evidence is weak and complicated. However, financial reporting did not do a good job in reporting on risk ahead of the recent crisis; risks were hidden. Panellists also drew attention to the role of inadequate accounting in the financial problems of sovereign states.     

Presidential Address: Debt and Money: Financial Constraints and Sovereign Finance

Economic analyses of corporate finance, money, and sovereign debt are largely considered separately. I introduce a novel corporate finance framing of sovereign finance based on the analogy between fiat liabilities for sovereigns and equity for corporations. The analysis focuses on financial constraints at the country level, making explicit the trade‐offs involved in relying on domestic versus foreign‐currency debt to finance investments or government expenditures. This framing provides new insights into issues ranging from the costs and benefits of inflation, optimal foreign exchange reserves, and sovereign debt restructuring.     

British Management Accounting Research: Whence and Whither: Opinions and Recollections

This paper is about the development of cost and/or management accounting research in Britain. The authors are three researchers active in this area from the 1970s until the present. The history has not been constructed from careful archival reconstruction of events, or publications, or surveys of colleagues. Rather, it is a personal joint recollection of how the area grew by three scholars involved in this process and perhaps having spent too long in bars discussing it. As history this paper must be carefully covered by caveats—it may be more revealing of the attitudes, perceptions and preoccupations of a set of scholars, than an exact chronology of events. Nevertheless, we hope that even this may be of curiosity. Having traced the chronology of British management accounting research, the paper concludes with the authors’ assessment of British research contributions up to the turn of the twentieth century. This includes a review of the current situation, insofar as it can be discerned and, even more tentatively and with trepidation, possible future prospects for British management accounting research.     

美国“两房”危机分析及启示

文章分析了“两房”危机的形成过程,以及美国政府应对“两房”危机的救助措施。虽然美国金融海啸对国内上市银行的投资影响不大,但国内银行业对海外投资与交易的风险管理有待加强。面对全球市场动荡,文章从加强监管、完善政策调控、稳定房地产市场发展,以及提高金融机构风险管理能力等方面提出应对之策。     

Growth and democracy: Trade-offs and paradoxes

The present paper attempts to reveal the relationships between some long-run systemic processes (on the economic, ecological, social and symbolic levels) and the theme of democracy. Starting from the distinction between democracy and autonomy, the paper focusses on its main issue: the trade-off between growth and autonomy. Continual growth can be produced, and indeed has been produced throughout history, only if accompanied by a loss of autonomy, even, beyond a certain scale threshold, to the detriment of representative democracy. While this conflict has never been rejected by political theorists, it has, in actual fact, been removed from all political debate.The second part of the paper seeks to individuate some of the long-run basic dynamics that characterise the global system: the analysis starts from the growth/accumulation/innovation process which characterized industrial capitalism, first, and financial capitalism, later, pointing out its self-pursuing, multi-scale, emergent nature with its main consequences for both ecological and social sustainability. The outcome of these processes, such as the loss of well-being, the increasing social and ecological costs and the growing fragmentation of the collective imaginary, in the long run leads the global system towards a condition of non equilibrium, from which either scenarios of greater autonomy or fatal risks for democracy itself, may emerge.     

Technology and values: problems and options

Science, technology and industry have come to form a positive feedback system of accelerating change, greatly extending the political choice and load carried by the democratic process, and having a potentially massive impact on culture and values. Three possible options are considered for dealing with this situation: limiting research, limiting dissemination, and reforming social institutions and culture. Only one aspect of the third option is considered, ie, the development of an appropriate epistemology to deal with the interaction of science, technology and values. The expansionist claim that science itself is developing to explain the sources of ethics, and will increasingly subsume the traditional areas of social science and the humanities has its problems. The views of the scientific restrictionist, Sir Geoffrey Vickers, a member of the Futures Advisory Board who died recently, deserve wider attention.     

Risk management and governance:: a post-normal science approach

In this essay we consider the problems of risks and governance in the light of three well-known examples: the ‘Seveso' accident involving dioxin; the BSE epidemic; and the licensing of genetically modified maize. These form a natural progression, from hazards that are ‘classical', manageable mainly by ‘applied science', to those that are totally post-normal. The new hazards typified by genetically modified maize, but including many others such as untested toxic chemicals, pose serious challenges to governance. The erosion of trust in the established institutions could lead to paralysis of innovation and also of government.     

垄断与通货膨胀:理论与证据

本文从微观层面构建多维状态非线性系统理论模型,应用非线性模型预测控制方法研究了垄断与通货膨胀之间的关系。理论分析表明,垄断与通胀存在明显的正向关系。本文进一步应用变系数半参数估计方法为上述理论预期提供了经验支持,并发现我国在生产效率较低的行业中,垄断会导致显著的通胀效应,但这种效应在生产效率较高的行业中则明显减弱。上述结论对我国当前“下限保增长、上限防通胀”的宏观调控目标具有重要的启示意义。     

Accounting and empire: Professionalization-as-resistance: The case of Philippines

This paper examines the emergence of the Philippine public accounting profession, which began with the Philippine accounting law in 1923 when the Philippines was a colony of the United States. Our study covers the period from 1898 (the American invasion of the Philippines) to 1929 (the immediate aftermath of the law). Extant research into the emergence of professionalization projects identifies as precursors: a competitive market for accounting services, self-organizing groups of accountants, and a ‘self-directed’ modernist state. These precursors did not apply to the Philippines. We propose that the Philippine project is best understood as a form of native resistance (Said, 1993, Culture and Imperialism, Chatto & Windus Ltd.). We argue that the law, promoted by a wholly-Filipino legislature, simultaneously both (a) addressed American concerns about financial probity and Filipino competence and (b) sought to (pre)capture the identity and work of the certified public accountant (CPA) from the Americans, who introduced the CPA into Philippine politics to expose Filipino mismanagement of government monies.