New Public Management System, The Government Accounting Theory Study

Most of the western countries classify accounting into government accounting, non-profit organization accounting and enterprise accounting based on the criteria of operation target and operation pattern. Among them, as long as government accounting is concerned, there are generally two kinds of theory and practice: one is British - American kind, with Britain, United States of America, New Zealand and other English speaking countries adopting it; the other theory and practice is European kind, which has two versions, one is "Latin" version, with French, Italy and Spain as representatives, the other version is "German" version, with Germany, Swiss land and Scandinavian countries as representatives, to a significant degree, Holland also uses this version. Quite to the contrary of western countries, China has not established its own government accounting system yet, even the word "government accounting" has never appeared in Chinese formal government documents up to now. Currently only government budget accounting is used in China. Compared with the general government accounting concept around the world, our government budget accounting system is very limited in its content, and it only covers the accounting of part of movement of government financial assets, i.e., the part of movement of financial assets included in government budget. While government accounting covers all the aspects of government financial assets movement.Since the eighties of twentieth century, a new public management movement questioning the effectiveness of traditional public administration has come into being. It was originated in Britain, United States, Australia and New Zealand, and spread quickly to other western countries and even to all over the world. It has become a popular international trend, "representing a fashion, the administration reform occurred not only in constitutional monarchial countries, but also in democratic republic countries; not only in a singles state, but also in federal states; not only in cabinet government, but also in president government; not only in freemarketing region, but also in planned economy; not only in places controlled by right wing parties, but also in places controlled by left wings."During this new public management movement, government accounting has becoming a focused topic increasingly. Most countries are contemplating their own framework of government accounting. On the first thought, government accounting reform might looks like a simple technical issue, but actually, an effective and efficient government accounting framework has great influence on the long-term development of economy and could play an important role in supporting the healthy growth of public management. We can even say that the most advanced public management concept would not work well without the assistance of a current development of government accounting.Based on the development of marketing economy and democracy, our public management system has many breakthroughs in various aspects. The examples are marketing ingredients in government function, public service provided by society, administration with laws strategy, transparency of government procedures, the improved awareness of cost efficiency and risk management, and the occurrence of various kinds of new concepts and new ideas, which all shows that our public management has reached a new level. The report of 16th CPC party conference set up a government reform target: "further changing government functions, improving management styles, introducing electronic administration, improving administration efficiency, lowing administration cost, forming standard, cooperative, fair and transparent, honest and highly efficient government administration system". The target revealed China's spirit of reforming with times, and innovation, and it also gives a direction to the further public management reforming. However, the sharp contrast is that our current government budget accounting system, formed on the traditional and highly concentrating planned economy, has not made large b...