Management accounting practices in developing countries since the 1990s: the case of Poland

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to identify the type of management accounting (MA) practices used in business entities surveyed in Poland, and to recognize the direction and factors of changes in MA methods and tasks in the al- most three decades of the dynamically developing market economy in Poland, after the change of the sociopolitical system at the turn of the 1980s and 1990s. The author answers several research questions based on a review of the previous literature and data obtained from three surveys conducted in 1999, 2005, and 2016. This study confirmed that the number of companies in Poland which have departments that carry out tasks in the area of MA/controlling has increased steadily. The research indicates that operational MA methods dominat- ed in enterprises between 2010–2015, just like in 2000–2005 and in the 1990s. It also found that in no more than 10% of the medium and large business entities which responded in 2016 are the methods of strategic MA used. In the first period of the development of the market economy in Poland, i.e., until 2004, many different economic and institutional factors influenced the introduction and change in MA practices, and in the next period, the respondents of the empirical studies pointed to economic factors as being more important. The paper contributes to the litera- ture on the development of MA in Central and Eastern European countries on the example of Poland.