The Political Processes and Role Of Gatekeepers in Setting Accounting Standards for Agriculture

Many accounting regulations are introduced in response to crises of some kind, arising from a corporate collapse or claims that published financial reports have been misleading. In contrast, the IASC’s IAS 41 Agriculture standard was developed from the mid-1990s and issued in 2000, two years after the Australian AASB 1037 Self-Generating and Regenerating Assets (SGARA) standard, followed in 2004 by New Zealand’s NZ IAS 41 Agriculture. There had been no prior crisis or public expression of concern about shortcomings in existing practice. This study considers the background to the emergence of accounting for agriculture onto the agenda of standard-setting bodies, and the role played by different insiders. Here, they are collectively termed ‘gatekeepers’, the key staff, expert technical advisers and decision-makers who were members of standard-setting boards. Examination of the development of these new standards extends beyond consideration of technical accounting issues. Several case studies identify the regulatory and political processes each standard-setting agency adopted to consider and then progress the topic through all rule-making stages and resulting lobbying activities by significant users. These political processes are examined using the Cobb and Elder (1972, 1983) agenda-building framework and the Cobb, Ross and Ross (1976) analysis of institutional dynamics. The history of accounting for agriculture, in Australia and New Zealand, is traversed to explain the historical background to the new omnibus agricultural standards promulgated in Australasia. Significant events described include the AASB staff recommendation to the IASB in 2003 to split IAS 41 in two before its designated 2005 commencement date – a recommendation which, so far, has been ignored. New research material includes unpublished documents relating to the initial AASB Project Brief and IASC Point Outline background proposals for each standard, the IASC’s Field Test Report prior to adopting its IAS 41 standard and the AASB 1037 standard post implementation review – possibly the first ever to be undertaken. The study found that the activities of key insiders were consistent with what Cobb et al. (1976) described as the inside access model, both in placement of the topic on the agenda and then subsequent incorporation of proposals for fair value accounting for agriculture. A feature of the events described in this study was the interaction between the different standard-setting bodies – a possibility little-described in the accounting literature, and arguably a significant element in the manner in which standards were considered and developed by the IASC, and latterly the IASB. Overall, a combination of intra- and inter-agency lobbying resulted in compromise reflected in the final text of IAS 41. This modified the full fair value accounting proposal. The study found that gatekeepers paid little regard to submissions from experienced industry representatives, accountants, academics and other commentators world-wide. Practical evidence from parties concerning the utility of the proposed new rules was requested too late to influence the content of the final IAS 41 standard. Not surprisingly, the standard is still controversial

Continuous GPS Measurements of Postglacial Adjustment in Fennoscandia, 2. Modeling Results

Data collected under the auspices of the BIFROST GPS project yield a geographically dense suite of estimates of present-day, three-dimensional (3-D) crustal deformation rates in Fennoscandia [ Johansson et al., 2002 ]. A preliminary forward analysis of these estimates [ Milne et al., 2001 ] has indicated that models of ongoing glacial isostatic adjustment (GIA) in response to the final deglaciation event of the current ice age are able to provide an excellent fit to the observed 3-D velocity field. In this study we revisit our previous GIA analysis by considering a more extensive suite of forward calculations and by performing the first formal joint inversion of the BIFROST rate estimates. To establish insight into the physics of the GIA response in the region, we begin by decomposing a forward prediction into the three contributions associated with the ice, ocean, and rotational forcings. From this analysis we demonstrate that recent advances in postglacial sea level theory, in particular the inclusion of rotational effects and improvements in the treatment of the ocean load in the vicinity of an evolving continental margin, involve peak signals that are larger than the observational uncertainties in the BIFROST network. The forward analysis is completed by presenting predictions for a pair of Fennoscandian ice histories and an extensive suite of viscoelastic Earth models. The former indicates that the BIFROST data set provides a powerful discriminant of such histories. The latter yields bounds on the (assumed constant) upper and lower mantle viscosity (νUM, νLM); specifically, we derive a 95% confidence interval of 5 × 1020 ≤ νUM ≤ 1021 Pa s and 5 × 1021 ≤ νLM ≤ 5 × 1022 Pa s, with some preference for (elastic) lithospheric thickness in excess of 100 km. The main goal of the (Bayesian) inverse analysis is to estimate the radial resolving power of the BIFROST GPS data as a function of depth in the mantle. Assuming a reasonably accurate ice history, we demonstrate that this resolving power varies from ∼200 km near the base of the upper mantle to ∼700 km in the top portion of the lower mantle. We conclude that the BIFROST data are able to resolve structure on radial length scale significantly smaller than a single upper mantle layer. However, these data provide little constraint on viscosity in the bottom half of the mantle. Finally, elements of both the forward and inverse analyses indicate that radial and horizontal velocity estimates provide distinct constraints on mantle viscosity

A high-velocity scatterer revealed in the thinning ejecta of a type II supernova

We present deep, nebular-phase spectropolarimetry of the Type II-P/L SN 2013ej, obtained 167 days after explosion with the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope. The polarized flux spectrum appears as a nearly perfect (92% correlation), redshifted (by ∼4000 km s−1) replica of the total flux spectrum. Such a striking correspondence has never been observed before in nebular-phase supernova spectropolarimetry, although data capable of revealing it have heretofore been only rarely obtained. Through comparison with 2D polarized radiative transfer simulations of stellar explosions, we demonstrate that localized ionization produced by the decay of a high-velocity, spatially confined clump of radioactive 56Ni—synthesized by and launched as part of the explosion with final radial velocity exceeding 4500 km s−1—can reproduce the observations through enhanced electron scattering. Additional data taken earlier in the nebular phase (day 134) yield a similarly strong correlation (84%) and redshift, whereas photospheric-phase epochs that sample days 8 through 97 do not. This suggests that the primary polarization signatures of the high-velocity scattering source only come to dominate once the thick, initially opaque hydrogen envelope has turned sufficiently transparent. This detection in an otherwise fairly typical core-collapse supernova adds to the growing body of evidence supporting strong asymmetries across nature’s most common types of stellar explosions, and establishes the power of polarized flux—and the specific information encoded by it in line photons at nebular epochs—as a vital tool in such investigations going forward. © 2021. The Author(s). Published by the American Astronomical Society.Immediate accessThis item from the UA Faculty Publications collection is made available by the University of Arizona with support from the University of Arizona Libraries. If you have questions, please contact us at [email protected]

Self assessments of participants on enterprise training courses

This paper discusses research which was stimulated by the controversial question of the educability of entrepreneurial characteristics and the economic value of enterprise training. The research focuses on participants on enterprise training courses within the Irish Republic which aim to help people to set up and run businesses. An attempt was made to develop a technique, that is an adapted Osgood's Sematic Differential Technique, for use in the exploration of participants’ perceptions of entrepreneurial characteristics. This technique could represent a useful assessment technique for appraising participants’ attitudes to themselves as entrepreneurs and any changes over the duration of a training course in participants’ identification with entrepreneurial characteristic. Although, this technique would require self assessments, it could be used to establish the conditions for the development of entrepreneurial characteristics and explore questions of whether entrepreneurial characteristics may be developed. Despite methodological limitations, the reported study lends support to the thesis that many entrepreneurial characteristics may be developed over the duration of enterprise training courses in the view of participants