Accounting and Accountability in Local Government: A Framework

Jones and Pendlebury (1992) have emphasised that “accounting is a purposive activity”, i.e. it is “directed towards a specified end” and “must above all be useful”. Luder (1992) has shown that the existing cross-country variations in government accounting models stem from environmental pressures and from the needs of external and internal users. This paper focuses on the relationship between the goals assigned to local government (LG) accounting systems over time and their technical features, and aims at identifying the main methodological issues concerning such relationship.