The Evolution of Global Standards in Accounting

Abstract

FORSEVERALDECADEScompani es in many key industries have confronted increasingly more worldwide competition.They have responded to this challenge with strategies of globalization.As a result, not only the leading companies now operate on a global basis with subsidiaries in all important countries or regions.The pressure to globalize is also felt by many small and medium-size enterprises that supply components or specialized services to the giant multinational companies.Most of the leading companies still have a strong national home base.However, for many companies, especially from smaller countries like Switzerland or Scandinavia, the importance of the home market is almost negligible.For example, the 1998 net sales of Nokia in Finland, its home market, constituted only 3.5 percent of total sales. 1In addition, in the past few years, increasing cross-border merger activities have resulted in companies that are viewed as global players (for example, ABB, Daimler-Chrysler, and Adventis).Although no longer national in character, such companies are still subject to national regulation-last but not least in the areas of accounting and financial reporting.Globalization strategies are not restricted to operating and investing activities but increasingly also involve financing.Foreign listings are not new to U.S. multinationals or many of the large European companies being 2. See FASB (1999b), par.1.1, 1.5, 1.6; IASC (1995), par. 1. 3.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 20 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.