engleski

The Comparison of Public Sector Accounting between Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina

The decisive influence on the shaping of governmental accounting at the country level comes from two sources. The national source defines the specifics that are conditional and dependent on one country social system and economic development, nation’s level of education and intellectual capital as well as on country’s customs, tradition and culture. The international sources are harmonization and unification of methodological and legislative frameworks and national accounting practices, which further lead to reducing national specifics. The transfer and use of other countries’ experiences into national frameworks have its special features with both good and bad sides. This paper analyses the governmental accounting development in two countries: the Republic of Croatia (RH) and Bosnia and Herzegovina (BIH) from two entities—the Republic of Srpska (RS) and the Federation Bosnia and Herzegovina (FBIH) viewed through a 25-year period (1990– 2015). The goal is to compare the path of development and identify key influences on solutions in a particular period of time (several phases of accounting system development). Therefore, in this paper authors analyse the characteristics of national governmental accounting in the aforementioned two countries, through various system development periods, and identify factors that have influenced the developments. Also, the paper explores the similarities and differences between the current characteristics of governmental accounting and financial reporting in the RH and BIH. Furthermore, authors explore and detect possible implementation obstacles for application of accrual accounting. The results of this paper might be helpful to national authorities in continuing the improvements of national governmental accounting legislation and might be useful to other countries that are in comparable situations. We find that this international comparison study contributes to the existing literature and is potentially of interest for the international and national standard setters (i.e. IPSASB).

Public sector accounting, Accrual accounting

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