Route Choice On The Changes Of Government Accounting System

During three decades of reform and opening up, china economic system is switching from the planned economy to the socialist market economy, the government budget accounting is facing a dynamic reform environment that has never faced before. Both the integrity and transparency of government accounting information are confronting new challenges, they need to change and adjust to the convert of government function and the gradually increasing social supervision as well as the demands of global integration. Meanwhile, the evaluation of the government’s achievements during on-going construction and the reforming system of public finance also needs to cooperate with the improvement of government accounting. The party’s Third Plenary Session of the 18th Central Committee of the CPC about decisions to comprehensively deepen reforms of some major issues, which approved and made clear of the necessity of "to establish a inter-annual budget balance mechanism and to establish an accrual government consolidated financial reporting system", The Government Work Report(2014) also stated "to establish a standard of financing mechanism in local government debt, to put the government debts into the budget management, to carry out the government consolidated financial reporting system, and to prevent as well as resolve the debt risk". It is a general trend that Chinese government accounting system takes a new round reform. If the government budget accounting should be achieved a fundamental change, how to break through the traditional operating mechanism will be the realistic problems which policy makers unable to escape. To solve this problem, we can’t help to ask:Is our government accounting system mature enough to meet the reform? Which obstacles will face in change process? How to design feasible path to overcome these obstacles in order to ensure the realization of the goal of reform performance?In the perspective of neo-institutional economics, essentially, the reform of government accounting is the change of government accounting system. As a "public product", there are various constraint conditions in the substitution, transformation and transaction activities of the government accounting system. Uncertainty, under the circumstance of asymmetric information, changes of the government accounting system is the process of reconstruction of stakeholders. In the given constraint conditions, the ultimate goal of reform is that the controlled resources are allocated efficiently and stakeholders achieve the maximization of the utility, excepted the reform of government accounting system. In the process of the research, we systematically analyzed different kinds of influential factors of deep reform issues, for example, the equilibrium of supply and demand as well as institutional change path obstacles, path dependence, route choice in the change of the government accounting system to make right choice and proper positioning of the orientation of the reform of government accounting in China, which makes the practice of the reform of China’s government accounting carried properly.This paper is a normative study on the reform of government accounting, using the changes of government accounting system as main line, aiming to study how to transit from the out-dated government accounting system management into a new one so that we can create a balanced system. Specifically, this paper mainly answers three fundamental questions of the reform of government accounting in China:(1) The system changing equilibrium problem---Whether China’s current government needs reform? That is to say, the supply and demand of our government accounting system is balanced or not. (2)The institutional change path obstacles and dependence---what factors are that government accounting system need to deal and what impacts are that the original can bring on. (3) The arrangement problem of institutional change---how to achieve a smooth transition from the old system to the new one? In other words, the path design, direction strategy and performance guarantee of government accounting reform. It is this paper’s ultimate goal of this research to answer these three questions concerning the changes of government accounting system.This paper consists of eight parts:The first part is the introduction, which introduces the research background, significance, research contents, research ideas and methods, plus innovation and deficiency.The second part is the literature review, mainly presents and evaluates some existing research results on government accounting reform both from home and abroad, concerning the government accounting system environment, change effect and demands of government accounting system change as well as change path.The third part is the theoretical basis, which mainly introduces the system theory, the system change theory and the system theory of supply and demand; it also gives preliminary theoretical analysis of the government accounting system change.The forth part is the analysis of supply and demand of the government accounting system. This part analyzes the current supply and demand which we discuss the consistency to analyze the equilibrium state of the current government accounting system, based on the government accounting environment in China.The fifth part is the analysis of institutional change path obstacles. Using the Liider contingency model, this part analyzes the relationship between China’s government accounting environment and the government accounting reform, it also makes a comprehensive analysis of the incentive factors existed in the process of reform, social, economic, political and management variables as well as the barriers in implementation etc. At the same time, this part analyzes the cost and benefit of government accounting system vicissitude, from the aspects of individual, the whole society and politics etc. Using the "transaction costs dichotomy", it constructs the government accounting system vicissitude costs analysis model, meanwhile analyzes the types and impact of transaction costs in government accounting vicissitude.The sixth part summarizes the course of the changes in our government accounting system. It also analysis the characteristic of institutional path dependence and effect of path selection.The seventh part analyzes and compares the typical national and regional government accounting changes course and path characteristics, summed up the general rules of accounting institutional change path of governments. Using "Hainan model" to analyze the change of demand and the path selection that can provides the reference for the path choice of government accounting system changes.The eighth part studies the accounting design and selection. Based on the proceeding analysis, we think that the government accounting system transition path will be gradual incremental change. In order to realize the reform performance goals, besides step phased strategy, we should matching system arrangement to make the system change smooth.