A Sino-American Comparison of Budget and Accounting Coverage

Abstract

A central purpose of comparative international government accounting research (CIGAR) is to describe and explain the similarities and differences in the government accounting - including budgetary - practices of countries. To the extent such differences are due to the nature of their political and economic systems, variability in the environmental factors will help to explain these differences. During the Twentieth Century, the public sector environment of accounting in many countries underwent radical changes. Nowhere have changes been more profound than in China and Russia. The October Revolution in Russia created a vastly enlarged public sector for the Soviet Union and World War II expanded the Soviet empire into Eastern Europe. The next global expansion took place in 1949 when a half billion people came under communist rule in China. In spite of the significance of such a vast expansion, the Western English-language literature is sparse on socialist government accounting. By the time the first CIGAR conference was held in 1987, democratization was emerging in Eastern Europe and market reform was well underway in China. In this context, Alicja Jaruga and Lu Ting-gang reported on how reforms began to affect public sector accounting in Poland and China, respectively (Chan and Jones, 1988). Since then, Jaruga and Novak (1995) continued to monitor developments in Poland, while the author began to seriously study Chinese public sector accounting a few years ago.