Socio-Economic Review Advance Access published online on October 16, 2007
Socio-Economic Review, doi:10.1093/ser/mwm011
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Socio-economic impacts of international accounting standards: an introduction
1 CNAM, 75002 Paris, France
2 Saïd Business School, University of Oxford, Oxford OX1 1HP, UK
Correspondence: yuri.biondi{at}free.fr tomo.suzuki{at}sbs.ox.ac.uk
‘Why discuss accounting in Socio-Economic Review?’
‘Because accounting constructs socio-economic reality.’
‘How?!’
‘Theoretically speaking, there should be many ways of doing "account-ing" — an act of explaining business realities to multiple stakeholders of socio-economies. Practically speaking, however, the current trend is to use "Fair Value Accounting" which is considered to be useful particularly for investors, and this is now being globally standardized.’
‘What are the impacts of such new accounting on wider stakeholders and on the socio-economy at large?’
‘Many aspects of our life may have been undemocratically administrated without being noticed, because the Fair Value Accounting is presumed to be fair, while it is not.’
In order to promote discussions over how our socio-economies should be accounted for, this paper introduces, in a reader-friendly manner, problems of the International Accounting Standards (IAS) and the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS)1, and calls for diverse perspectives of future research.
Key Words: politics of accounting regulation • sociology of accounting • UNIAS project • corporate finance • financialization • business economics