The Harmonization Process of International Accounting Standards

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the movement toward harmonization of accounting standards from the 1970s. Forces that influence the movement are identified and examined. Thirty-one countries have been selected for comparison. By analyzing the data, countries can be classified into four accounting clusters and the result shows that countries in each cluster share similar accounting practices.The study also indicates that global harmonization of accounting standards is not very successful due to various factors that will be discussed in the paper. However, regional harmonization has shown great improvement since 1970 especially for those countries grouped in the same cluster.