Search results

The purpose of this paper is to understand the process of accounting change in Indonesian local government. It sets to explore how various reform drivers with different interests and preferences compete and cooperate in the process of governmental accounting reform policy formulation in a developing country context.

The paper adopts a qualitative case study research involving semi‐structured interviews with the key informants within the institutional environment under which the local government organizations operate. This paper looks at the introduction of new accounting systems as a result of public sector reform in Indonesia local government by focusing on how the policy of reform was formulated. A review of related documents and regulations, as well as interviews with key informants, was conducted to gather information on accounting change.

The process of governmental accounting reform is characterized by rivalries and alliances amongst reform drivers. This confirms the political nature of the process of accounting policy formulation found in the extant literature of accounting policy setting.

This is a case study research within the institutional settings of Indonesian government bureaucracy. Any generalization of the conclusions from this study should undertaken with care even though there are similarities between Indonesian and other developing countries as institutions operate differently in different countries.

As the vast majority of studies in the extant literature have focused, mainly, on accounting reform in the context of developed countries, this paper makes important contribution by highlighting accounting changes in Indonesian local government.

What do purchasing officers and policy theorists have to offer one another? Policy frameworks could help purchasing officers anticipate or predict change and respond to those changes earlier and more effectively. Likewise, purchasing officers and the study of the governmental purchasing systems they operate could contribute a great deal to the development of policy theories or frameworks. This paper outlines the central features of two important policy frameworks; institutional analysis and development (IAD) within the tradition of institutional rational choice (Ostrom, 1999), and the advocacy-coalition framework (Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith, 1999) and applies those frameworks to the government purchasing arena.

To help firms with their international operations, governments often create policies and support mechanisms, but its influence on the firm's exit decision has so far been ignored. Hence, the purpose of this study is to examine the impact of home-country governmental support on the firm's exit decision.

The authors test their conceptual model using multiple informants as well as secondary data from China. The sample consists of 360 valid questionnaires from 180 firms. Binary logistics regression is used to test the conceptual framework.

By demonstrating that resource-based and institutional constructs are highly dependent, the authors show how home-country governmental support interacts with the foreign affiliate's past performance to explain the decision to remain or exit a foreign market. The results indicate that while governmental financial support reduces the likelihood of exiting a poorly performing business in the foreign market, governmental non-financial support surprisingly has an opposite effect.

While there has been an increasing number of firms exiting foreign markets, this area of research is still limited. The study also contributes to the literature by focusing on home-country governmental financial and non-financial support to explain the firm's exit decision – an issue that has been ignored and is expected to be particularly relevant for firms from emerging economies.

The Chinese Government encourages firms to diffuse their operational-level environmental management (EM) into their organization’s mission and strategy to develop strategic EM to promote sustainable development. The purpose of this paper is to utilize two concepts of institutional theory (isomorphic pressures and decoupling behavior) to assess how different institutional forces arising from Chinese macro-level factors (market pressure, business turbulence, legal voids, carbon policy, structural-level governmental interference and guanxi with government) influence the efficacy of strategic EM.

In partnership with a major consulting firm in China, the authors collect multi-informant survey data from 183 manufacturing firms drawn from a variety of industries for testing the hypotheses posited.

The efficacy of strategic EM in the sampled firms is confirmed by the positive association with environmental performance. The authors also find that the efficacy of strategic EM is weakened by market pressure, business turbulence and legal voids, whereas it is strengthened by structural-level governmental interference. However, carbon policy and guanxi with government do not impact it significantly.

To extend the findings on the environmental importance of strategic EM, future research can develop and validate a management framework to guide the adoption of strategic EM. With regard to the four valid macro-level factors influencing the efficacy of strategic EM, future research can identify the reasons (e.g. conflict with corporate functions) behind them to aid manufacturers to mitigate their negative influence or enhance the positive influence on strategic EM.

China’s Government and its manufacturers (or those sharing a similar institutional environment) can expand the scope of their EM efforts from operational-level EM practices to strategic EM. The findings on the valid macro-level factors have led to practical suggestions for government bodies and manufacturers to improve the efficacy of strategic EM adoption. Overall, the implications help achieve the higher levels of firm-level environmental performance and alleviate the global pollution problem.

A particular value of this work lies in the demonstration of combining institutional theory (organization decoupling, isomorphic pressures) with practical consideration such as guanxi with government in the particular institutional environment of China to help address an important and context-related problem, environmental performance.

China has become the world’s largest vehicle market, because of the strong governmental support to boost car sales and particularly because of the establishment of joint ventures between state-owned enterprises and world-class automakers. However, because many Sino-foreign joint ventures have performed unsatisfactorily in terms of creating indigenous brands, the purpose of this paper is to explore the cause-and-effect relationships among governmental policy support, Sino-foreign joint ventures and own-brand innovation in China’s passenger-car industry.

After briefly introducing the development history of the Chinese auto industry and reviewing relevant literature, first, the analytic hierarchy process method is used to create a unique, context-specific equation to measure the degree of policy support in China. This paper then uses the hierarchical multiple regression method to process the 2014 public data set.

The findings show that the degree of policy support increases the preference of the firms for producing foreign-brand cars, while such a relationship is fully mediated by the establishment of Sino-foreign joint ventures.

The research brings greater and deeper insights into the interplay among governmental policy, the conduct of own-brand strategy and international joint ventures in China’s auto market, showing that policy support may not always be beneficial, but sometimes be detrimental to indigenous innovation.

This paper can be seen as an exciting step that adds to a better understanding of the role of political support in shaping the strategic choices of firms in terms of brand innovation in the Chinese automobile industry. The proposed novel, context-specific approach for evaluating the degree of policy support embodies the distinctive institutional complexity and intricate social network embedded in the local car market during the period of China’s socio-economic transformation – an approach that is original in this field.

The international women's movement has always focused on discrimination against women, but only in the past few decades have activists been focusing on violence against women, and within this framework, domestic violence. Global feminist activism found common ground in protecting women from physical, sexual, and emotional abuse. This framework traveled to Eastern Europe with the advent of regime changes there. In post-communist Europe, it took only a decade and a half for the Polish, Czech, Slovak, Hungarian, and Slovene governments to react to domestic and global pressures and establish new definitions and policies regarding domestic violence. However, the feminist NGOs’ definitions and policy recommendations met with limited success. Feminist-inspired norms, such as specific domestic violence courts and distancing ordinances, diffused to a mediocre level of half-hearted official responses in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). This middle-of-the-road approach attempted to de-gender and thus to de-politicize feminists’ fundamental gender-sensitive claims. A norm diffusion to reach the middle ground took place through a complex set of interactions that involved various types of political actors ranging from international governmental organizations, such as the UN and the EU, governments, international and local NGOs. Analyzing the process of these multiple-level and manifold interactions sheds light on the partially deterritorialized nature of globalization. The development of norms and their difffnousion regarding domestic violence policy also inform us about how democratic processes, efforts to achieve gender equality, and the global context interact in CEE.

This paper aims to analyse how the supreme audit institution (SAI) monitors related party transactions (RPTs) in the Brazilian public sector. It considers definitions and disclosure policies of RPTs by international accounting and auditing standards and their evolution since 1980.

Based on archival research on international standards and using an interpretive approach, the authors investigated definitions and disclosure policies. Using a topic model based on latent Dirichlet allocation, the authors performed a content analysis on over 59,000 SAI decisions to assess how the SAI monitors RPTs.

The SAI investigates nepotism (a kind of RPT) and conflicts of interest up to eight times more frequently than related parties. Brazilian laws prevent nepotism and conflicts of interest, but not RPTs in general. Indeed, Brazilian public-sector accounting standards have not converged towards IPSAS 20, and ISSAI 1550 does not adjust auditing procedures to suit the public sector.

The SAI follows a legalistic auditing approach, indicating a need for regulation of related public-sector parties to improve surveillance. In addition to Brazil, other code law countries might face similar circumstances.

Public-sector RPTs are an under-investigated field, calling for attention by academics and standard-setters. Text mining and latent Dirichlet allocation, while mature techniques, are underexplored in accounting and auditing studies. Additionally, the Python script created to analyse the audit reports is available at Mendeley Data and may be used to perform similar analyses with minor adaptations.

Regulatory authorities in Myanmar are increasing banks’ independence in providing loans to facilitate better financial resource allocations. On the other hand, not only in the USA but also among European countries, policymakers are designing regulations that could reduce banks’ autonomies in risk management and decrease risk taking behaviour. These governments have made policy interventions in their banking sectors which could be identified as repressive policies. They are commonly justified as macro-prudential regulations rather than financial repression. However, the authors are yet to understand as to what extent regulations need to be tightened or loosened up to reach optimal risk-taking behaviour. Using Myanmar as an example where the extreme form of governmental interventions and prudential regulations exists, this paper aims to identify the effectiveness of such policies.

This paper relies on a case study of the Myanmar’s Banking Sector. The paper adopts of the synthesis of institutional theory and Oliver’s strategic response to identify how banks respond to repressive financial policies. The empirical evidence is collected through conducting 16 interviews including banks’ general managers, deputy chairmen and loan officers. Afterwards, the authors analysed the data using categorical thematic analysis with the assistance of NVIVO.

First of all, the extent to which repressive financial measures enforced on banks differ depending on their political affiliations and ownership structures. Second, though repressive policies were enforced on banks to curb risk taking behaviour among banks and maintain financial stability, Myanmar banks themselves had inherent nature of risk aversion towards lending. Third, in Myanmar, financial repression does not always mean banks need to compromise their efficiency in profit maximisation to achieve legitimacy from the regulatory authorities. If the formal constraints were not in line with economic actors’ internal objectives, a different set of rules of the game were formed.

This paper provides new evidences for the controversial subject on financial repression and liberalisation through analysing micro level data of banks’ lending practice rather than using aggregate macro-level data. Bank-level information provides banks’ concerns, challenges and their loan assessment process while operating under repressive financial policies. This study is also unique in the sense that it is contributing to the limited academic literature on Myanmar’s financial system. It represents the last surviving case of repressed financial system and the presence governmental interventions and prudential regulations. Hence, it was used as an example to identify the effectiveness of such policies.