外文翻譯---國內(nèi)的會(huì)計(jì)和國際會(huì)計(jì)準(zhǔn)則-其他專業(yè)-展示頁
2025-01-31 09:25本頁面
【正文】 notice that some topics in the survey do not correspond with the original survey questions asked. This is because the survey results were prepared after an interactive process. First, I prepared the questions by analysing the whole of IAS, assessing which were its key requirements. Country teams of senior technical staff replied to the questions. I asked for clari?cations, often disputing country answers. Sometimes, new issues turned up. Consensus was eventually reached, and the country teams signed off on the lists of differences. This also explains another feature of GAAP 2021 upon which Ding et al. ment: that the country lists of differences are not in exactly the order of the original questions. They are broadly in the order of: (i) consolidation issues, (ii) assets, and (iii) liabilities. However, an exact order is less important if there is no intention to pare countries. Incidentally, researchers using other data might consider contacting the preparers of the data in order to ask questions such as these. . Respondent behavior Another possible bias in the data is behavioral. Some countries like to be seen to be ??international” and therefore to be plying with IAS. This includes many developing countries. By contrast, in 2021 (before the Enron/Andersen debacle), the US was emphasizing that its accounting was different from (. better than) IAS (. Bloomer, 1999). There was thus pressure from some countries to minimize the list of differences and from a few others to maximize it. I believe that we did not give way in the former case, but readers of the US entry in GAAP 2021 might notice that some of the ??divergence” from IAS is abstruse, meaning that US divergence is exaggerated. 3. Methodology This section contains some speci?c observations on the paper by Ding et al. (2021), under three headings. . Additivity Ding et al. need to add items together so as to create scores for countries in order to perform numerical analyses. In GAAP 2021, we resisted the temptation to add items together because the items are clearly of differing importance. The above Sections and mention some examples of this. It would require a great deal of work and subjectivity to weight items according to importance. Not surprisingly, Ding et al. did not do it. However, this might introduce systematic biases. First, because less ?nancially plex countries do not need the most plex rules, several of the ??absences” in developing countries might be of no practical importance. So, the ??absence” scores for those countries are exaggerated. Secondly, as noted earlier, Ding et al. reduce the problem of additivity by creating two distinct to tals: absence and divergence. Nevertheless, they add the two ??inconsistency” categories together, despite the attempt in GAAP 2021 to suggest that the second category was of less widespread practical importance. This might constitute a further systematic bias because, for example, many of the abstruse points of US divergence (see above) were deliberately put into the second category. Future researchers could calculate whether their results are robust to, for example, a double weighting of the ?rst category?s items pared to those in the second. . Are there really two separate dimensions? As noted above, Ding et al. construct measures of two separate ??dimensions” of difference from IAS: absence and divergence. They say (p. 4) that this is their paper?s ?rst contribution to the literature. However, I suggest that the distinction between the measures might not be useful. In the end, the important issue is whether accounting practices are ??good”2or are parable among ?rms nationally or internationally. The purpose of GAAP 2021 was to catalog various aspects of de?ciency in rules that could contribute towards poor or nonparable accounting. In that context, the absence of rules is not a separate dimension from divergence of rules, as now explained. Suppose that IAS requires FIFO for inventory valuation, Country X requires LIFO, Country Y allows FIFO or LIFO, and Country Z has no rules. Countries X and Y will turn up in Ding et al.?s ??divergence” from IAS, whereas Country Z will exhibit ??absence”. However, whereas panies in Country X will indeed diverge from IAS practices (assuming that panies obey the rules), panies in Country Y (and in Z) might mostly be consistent with IAS (. use FIFO). In other words, some examples of de jure divergence lead to the same result as absence, and some do not. Most of the de jure absences recorded in GAAP 2021 relate to whole accounting topics (. impairment or pensions), so are likely to be greater causes of de facto divergence than some of the detailed de jure divergences. For researchers
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