Search results

States that the Chinese market stands out both for its size and its record of growth. A growing literature identifies a wide range of challenges that must be confronted to launch a successful joint venture. Explores this literature and reports on how one medium‐sized European company, Nutrexpa SA, has successfully set up and developed a joint venture in China.

Accounting regulation is a highly topical issue for listed companies in Europe. From 1 January 2005 all companies listed in the EU member states have been required to produce financial reports compliant with international accounting standards. Financial reports will be comparable with each other only if full compliance with the international standards can be ensured. Historically, however, an enduring weakness of the international standard‐setting regime has been its inability to enforce compliance with its standards. There is a danger that implementation and compliance will be variable across the adopting countries, and that deeply ingrained national reporting practices will persist. Where such practices include a high incidence of earnings management techniques and behaviours, any improvement in the quality of reported financial information may be slow to materialise.

Comparative national management accounting is a young discipline. A recent survey of management accounting practice in Europe reveals five major issues that contrast across national management accounting practice. In the light of this work we undertook a survey of Spanish management accounts and found that there is declining use of official government guidance on management accounting; the emerging management accounting profession is qualified by university education, and is not generally involved in any professional body; although the literature indicates a strong Anglo‐American influence on modern Spanish management accounting, we found a strong, previously unreported, German influence; a wide range of innovative management accounting approaches have been tried; there is a move towards a planning objective as the focus of the management accountant’s work.

Despite attempts to secure harmonisation of accounting practice, significant variations in accounting rules and practice continue to arise in European countries, variations which give rise to compliance costs for multinational companies. First, this paper considers the relevance of international accounting harmonisation for European business. It then proceeds to examine accounting regulations in three countries: Spain, Sweden and Austria, highlighting the key regulatory issues of the “true and fair” view requirement and the link between taxation and accounting. The three countries are selected because of the interesting contrasts which they provide; these contrasts are examined in detail in the paper. The work is based on a series of interviews carried out with leading accounting practitioners in the three countries during 1996‐1997. The paper concludes that there are significant obstacles to accounting harmonisation in Europe and that there is potential for continuing diversity of national accounting practice.

Company financial managers, when confronted with a change in accounting regulations, may face a change in their economic environment as a result of the reaction of users to the reported accounting information. In 1990 a requirement for lessees to capitalize finance leases was introduced in Spain. Reports the results of a survey in Spain of two key groups, company financial managers and bank financial analysts. The study concludes that leasing companies successfully lobbied for changes in the accounting rules which actually proved adverse to their economic interests; and company managers and bank analysts misunderstand each other′s reactions to the capitalization of finance leases. Indicates that managers can benefit from studying research on economic impact issues before determining their own response.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the motivations for the adoption of quality management practices (QMPs) and the effects exerted by the advanced management information systems (AMIS) as mediating factors in a sector consisting of highly competitive companies with a high mortality rate in recent years: travel agencies.

The results were based on a survey completed by 185 travel agencies with less than 50 employees, covering over 5 per cent of the SME travel agencies in Spain. Structural equation modelling was used to analyse the links between the studied dimensions.

The findings indicate that QMPs have a positive, direct influence on the adoption of AMIS and that the adoption of AMIS has a positive, direct impact on financial performance. The results suggest that quality policies facilitate greater use of financial indicators but not in the use of non-financial indicators, where the key to better business performance lies.

Therefore, the results of this paper indicate that being proactive about quality practices can provide travel agencies a great number of benefits through the implementation of AMIS.

The purpose of this paper is to further research on the Kaplan and Norton (1996) balanced scorecard (BSC) model after having discerned that previous work has so far neglected to explore the interrelationships between the model’s dimensions and the influence contextual factors may have.

The data set used to meet this paper’s main objectives was collected using a structured online survey sent to the member companies of the Catalan Association of Accounting and Management (ACCID). Specifically, the surveys were directed to the heads of the finance departments. From the 3,500 mails sent, 336 companies decided to participate in the study. These figures represent an acceptable response rate of 9.6 per cent. As 83 of the companies declared that they would only use financial indicators, the final study sample totalled 253 firms.

The results demonstrate the mediating effects intermediate constructs have, and highlight how important leadership is in achieving success or high performance. These results follow on from previous empirical literature that analysed other management systems such as the Baldrige, the EFQM or the Deming models. In addition, some differences in the relationships as per the contextual factors studied have been detected. Therefore, the conclusions reached in this paper will be of interest to both academics and professionals in perceiving and understanding the logical flow of consequences any decision taken will produce.

The authors’ main contributions are: to have strictly followed the theoretical BSC model by combining both formative and reflective dimensions using the emerging partial least squares methodology; to have based the study on 253 firms and to have used 37 category indicators which, to our knowledge, are more than any other previous work; to have developed a mediation model designed to appreciate the interrelationships the dimensions in the BSC model have; to have analysed the possible differences there are in the interrelationships between the dimensions using two widely accepted influencing contextual factors in current literature, namely a firm’s size and its typology.

A typological analysis of the management‐related documents that Spanish university libraries show on their Web sites is provided. The paper discusses about the structure and contents of the Web pages; provides some analysis on the location of the documents in the pages; and presents a view of document changes after 1 year, taking into account their presence and currency.