انتشار و نهادینه کردن اصلاحات در عرصه ی حسابداری بخش عمومی در کشورهای کمتر توسعه یافته: یک تحقیق به منظور مقایسه ی دولت های مرکزی نپال و سری- لانکا

One of the major issues in the developing world today is the alleviation of poverty and it is acknowledged that public sector accounting has a key role to play in this through the effective allocation of resources. Implementing public sector accounting changes in developing nations has been a key agenda of international organizations since the 1980s. This study, drawing on the ideas of new institutionalism, strives to explore the implementation of public sector accounting reforms in two less developed countries (LDCs), namely Nepal and Sri Lanka. The empirical findings of the study demonstrate that, while internationally propagated public sector accounting reform ideas have not gone beyond the trial/proposal stage in Nepal, colonialism has bequeathed on Sri Lanka the promotion of accounting education and training, enabling the country to implement some of these reform ideas. However, increasing resistance to accounting changes at the lower administrative level, witnessed in both countries, indicates a need to understand the contexts of LDCs and to fulfil basic preconditions prior to disseminating/embarking on reforms there.

New Public Management (NPM) reform ideas have been a means of reinventing the role of government in many countries in the last few decades (Hood, 1995). Accounting change, mainly a transition towards accruals in OECD member states, has been one of the most widely discussed NPM phenomena under the rubric of New Public Financial Management (NPFM) (Guthrie, Olson, & Humphrey, 1999). Despite this being a controversial reform, however, the extant literature demonstrates that there is no indication of a diminishing interest in accruals among OECD member countries (Hyndman & Connolly, 2011; Lapsley, Mussari, & Paulsson, 2009; Paulsson, 2006; Pollanen & Loiselle-Lapointe, 2012). More recently, the European Parliament has embarked on the process of drafting a legislative resolution to mandate member states to apply accrual accounting comprehensively and consistently, covering all sub-sectors of general government (Ball & Pflugrath, 2012). The importance of accrual accounting has been predicated on the assumption that it helps to enhance the transparency of governments’ obligations and contingent liabilities, incurred as part of their austerity measures to stabilize the markets.

This study has demonstrated that public sector accounting reforms in Nepal and Sri Lanka have been much affected by overseas developments since the 1970s, reflecting the trends for NPM and NPFM. In the context of Nepal, international organizations, which are the main carriers of reform ideas, the higher-level officers who have accepted these reform ideas, and the professional accountants who are promoting the ideas, have all been driven by their own self-motives and their own legitimation needs. Reforms are therefore mainly a matter of talk or part of a routine schedule, and have been confined to the proposal stage. In the case of Sri Lanka, meanwhile, the presence of normative and mimetic factors such as professionalism, education, and awareness of international trends, created through seminars and training, have produced some of the public sector accounting reform ideas, for instance PPB and the cash basis IPSAS. This finding is in line with the argument of Miller and Napier (1993), who express the view that present accounting practices are a product of distinct incidents and processes. This comparative study of Nepal and Sri Lanka has clearly illustrated how the reform contexts within LDCs, including the level of awareness among stakeholders and their participation in the reform process, differ due to the specific historical roots of the countries. We therefore argue that it is important for international organizations, policy makers, and professional accountants to at least take a glance at the specific context of LDCs and their stage of development, prior to disseminating a “one-size-fits-all” approach to accounting reform. Reforms initiated without acknowledging the context of the LDCs may serve more as a symbol of legitimacy and a decoupling of actual practice from the public rhetoric, rather than leading to any improvements in public sector management and service delivery.