Comparative Governmental Accounting Research Among Portugal, China And United Kingdom

In our country, along with the gradually establishing of socialism market economy and public financial management framework, as well as the reform of departmental budget, National treasury centralized payment system, and government revenue and expenditure, all these reforms have achieved many accomplishments for all can see, but with the reforms gradually deepening, many deep-seated problems begin to appear. To meet the demands of public finance, unified and standard government accounting principles should be established steadily. In2008, in the eleventh five year plan for national economy and social development, the concept of’promoting the reform of governmental accounting’is explicitly put forward for the first time. At present, the main direction of the governmental accounting reform in the developed countries is the introduction of accrual basis of accounting. But the urgent task reforming China’s budget accounting system is to set up the budget management mode of control-based orientation, solve the problems of compliance related with financial affairs. Therefore, it is necessary to summarize former experiences and lessons of the reform and focus on the study of Chinese government accounting reform problem.Using Liider’s Financial Management Reform Process Model and the theories of the governmental accounting comparative study, this thesis offers an inductive theory of Chinese government accounting in comparative-international perspective, in comparison with the United Kingdom and Portuguese. In the process, this probably shows the finally reason to explain the difference among countries.The present study finds that at present the theoretical study of comparative governmental accounting has present embryonic form. Many domestic experts and scholars have done a great deal studies on the issue of the causes and nature of governmental accounting diversity. They either put forward ideas on institutional environment or governmental accounting system content, but lack of views of combining them together. So far CIGAR studies have been almost exclusively non-quantitative and excessive centralization on Western European and Northern American countries, and lack of quantitative and field (comparative) studies. The main purpose of this paper is to analyze the causes of governmental accounting diversity from the two level of combining institutional environment and governmental accounting system content together, and use the non-statistical empirical research to analyze the causes of governmental accounting diversity.The essay consists of three parts, except for the part of introduction and literature review.The first part is theoretical foundation:public accountability, and which is being as the theory basis of empirical comparative study. That is, the entrusting parties of public accountability (government accounting subject) should undertake obligations to disclosure information and provide the informations which the entrusting party of public accountability (the users of governmental accounting informations) need. In other words, the users of government accounting information determine the target of governmental accounting, thus affecting the content of governmental accounting system.The second part is a comparative study. First, this thesis finds obvious difference in governmental accounting system by comparing governmental systems of China, Portuguese and UK from four dimension degrees which are the form of government accounting system, the form of rule system, principle of accounting and accounting goal. Second, the paper analyzes the causes of governmental accounting diversity from the two level of combining institutional environment and governmental accounting system content in comparison with China, the United Kingdom and Portuguese.The third part is the conclusion and policy suggestions. This part summarized the conclusion of study and put forward the corresponding policy recommendations.Based on the theory of the public accountability, compromising the institutional supply analysis of China, Portuguese and UK, combining their reality of governmental accounting, this paper discusses the cause of international government accounting differences. This paper has reached the following research conclusions:First, the paper has proved that the "preliminary parsimonious" model developed by Nobes is reasonable, which is used to explain an initially suggested split of business accounting systems in two classes:Class A resembling the Anglo-American, and Class B resembling the Continental European. In addition, the paper proves that financing system is really one of the reasons which result in the difference of international governmental accounting.Second, in a way, the research has proved part of arguments of Brusca Alijarde and Condor on the cause of international governmental accounting differences, that is:1. The target of government financial report and budget is the key reason of international government accounting system differences;2. The target of government financial report and budget is strongly restricted by the main users of financial report;3. Financing system (namely external financial resource provider) is related with the goal of the governmental financial report, because financial resource provider may also be the main users of financial reports.Last but not least, the paper has ascribed the causes of the difference between international governmental accounting systems to the the following five aspects:"Historical" reasons-tradition and evolution process of government accounting in each country;-Legal system;-The users of government financial (including budgetary) reporting information and their needs (purposes of the government financial reporting information);-The relationship between budget and accounting;-The financing system predominating in each country.