Decision-making stratagems for public sector accounting reforms in India - institutional perspectives

While International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) convergence has been the face of the global accounting standardisation movement for the past few decades, accounting reforms in the public sector had started to gain momentum from the late 1990s. The first major step towards adopting international accounting standards for the public sector is to transit from cash to accrual basis of accounting. This is then followed by the adoption or adaption of International Public Sector Accounting Standards (IPSAS) which are significantly influenced by principles of IFRS. This paper analyses the socio-economic and political contexts that shape the decision-making process of regulatory institutional re-arrangements for public sector accounting reforms in India. By analysing these contexts this paper attempts to arrive at answers for contradictory scenarios and rhetoric shaping the dynamics of such decision-making in countries moving towards these accounting reforms. Such analysis helps explain the dissemination of global accounting reforms through the perspectives of the local actors or rule-takers and the ways through which their understanding and interpretation of global ideas feed forward to shape the global context of rule-making. The paper draws upon and combines the concepts of institutional theory and transnational governance used in different studies to generate a theoretical framework suitable to analyse the socio-economic and political contexts of a developing country moving towards accounting reforms in the public sector.