Public management reform under the dome of accruals

Abstract

The main aim of this paper is to attest to the foremost role of accruals in achieving the public management reform, gathering evidence on implementation challenges and perceived outcomes. This study covers a significant literature gap and enriches the scientific research by underpinning the questions addressed in the New Public Management and Governance paradigms that put a lot of pressure on reforming public systems towards accrual principles. For fulfilling our goal, we performed an empirical analysis on three stages focusing on identifying the current state of budgeting and accounting bases across EU-OECD countries as a prerequisite of facilitating the wider public management reform initiatives looking for possible connections between them. The research design undergone for achieving our aim successfully combines various statistical methods and techniques (e.g. cluster analysis, Multidimensional Scaling technique, Principal Component Analysis, correlation analysis) to assess the status of accrual reform and its power to influence the degree of public management initiatives achievement. The results reveal that a majority of EU-OECD countries have completed their accrual reform programmes that bring many benefits to the public system as a whole, leading to major achievements of management initiatives, such as enhancing public transparency and accountability throughout accounting and budgeting reporting. Thus, accrual world is certainly the best way to improve public sector management and raise its efficiency, providing high-quality information for the decision-making process and allowing as well greater comparability between countries throughout reporting harmonization.