The Comparison Of Chinese And American Pension Accounting Based On Cultural Perspective

From the National bureau of statistics data,China has not only become an aging society,the degree of aging is increasing.The pension problem has become an important issue of the whole society,as the government released the first report about the aging society and the security of people's livelihood on September 2014 and Prime Minister Li Keqiang has given strong attention to pension during the two sessions in “the Government Work Report” in 2016.The pension problem has a very strong practical significance.Accounting professionals also following the trend,using the latest accounting standards of employee compensation issued by China's Ministry of Finance,added the Demission Welfare for the first time.And it specially recognizes measures and discloses the pension from the perspective of accounting.In such a social and industrial background,the pension is a hotspot and focus.As a kind of human management practice,accounting has to be affected by the culture,especially local culture and accounting culture.And pension accounting as a part of accounting will also be constrained by the local culture and accounting culture.Through reviewing domestic and foreign academic researches of pension,the research of pension accounting based on cultural factors is still a blank.So,the research on pension accounting in the perspective of culture has a strong academic exploring significance.Therefore,this article will do the research on pension accounting and relate culture with the pension accounting based on the background of culture.This article selects Hofstede's cultural dimensions theory and Grey's cultural accounting theory as theoretical support.The United States and China are the compared countries analyzed and discussed concerning pension accounting.The two countries' pension standards,raising management,recognition,measurement and disclosure will be compared to find the similarities and differences.To be more specific,Chinese believe in “Social Welfare” but Americans believe in “Labor Remuneration”.In China,most of the composition of pension is the state's financial subsidy,and accounting on the cash basis is very popular.While,in America,pension has been accumulated by the employees themselves and there are a variety of investment options.China is in the transition period of Accrual Basis and Cash Basis.At present,there are no pension assets and liabilities in the enterprise.While the American pension accounting is based on Accrual Basis and the enterprise has more mature management of pension assets and liabilities;Chinese pension deals with measurement based on the moment and chooses the Historical Cost Value at first,but it is American like using present value.In the disclosure process,the history of China's pension accounting information disclosure is short,the quality level is low,while the United States started early and has been in the leading position in the world.Secondly,through the culture of nation and accounting,analyze and explain the differences between China and the United States separately.Finally,the article will think deeply and explore the pension accounting under the world background and from the perspective of national culture and accounting culture in our country.This will propose the concept of dual nature pension,help raise and manage the pension by “collective unified type”,promote professional pension recognition,deepen the low-risk careful measurement,and increase the pension information disclosure transparency advice.This will allow pension accounting of our country be complete from a new angle.The biggest innovation of this paper is selecting a new angle to do the research on pension accounting,which is combining the culture and pension accounting.This is from comparing the similarities and differences of pension,tracing accounting back to cultural factors.As well as to analyze and explain the pension accounting based on the differences between the culture of China and the United States.And totally taking cultural factors into consideration,in turn,to further optimize the pension accounting of our country.Nevertheless,the amount of examples and reasons is the shortfall of this article.This article only compares differences between the United States and China,which lacks the culture in the middle transition countries such as Germany and Japan.At the same time,only the cultural perspectives consider the differences of pension accounting between China and the United States,which is not involved in economic,political,and other factors.Based on these two aspects,it will further be optimized in future research.