ETHICS IN ACCOUNTING PRACTICES AND ITS INFLUENCE ON BUSINESS PERFORMANCE

The objective of this study is to investigate and identify the importance of ethics in accounting practices and whether ethical accounting practices has any influence on the overall business performance and to create a guideline to encourage accounting professionals to understand and adopt ethical practices. The study explores how various demographical variables, specifically focusing on culture, gender and religion influence on an individual’s ethical decision-making process. The data used in this study was collected from the relevant literatures. The portals’ filters were used to identify the relevant literature to the research. The sample was chosen based upon the four themes including influence of ethical accounting practices on culture, gender, religion and impact on overall business performance. This study revealed that culture does not necessarily influence on ethical behaviour and decision-making. Conversely, a positive correlation has been found between the religion beliefs and ethical decision-making process. However, this research does not clearly point out the influence of ethical accounting practices and its influence on the business performance. This research also highlighted partial connections between how unethical accounting practices and fraudulent activities can become a threat to the business existence. The sample size and research technique restrict the results from generalising

Corporate Governance, Ownership Type and Corporate Performance in Emerging Economies: Empirical Evidence from Sri Lanka

This study examines the relationship between firm performance and ownership type and also the relationship between firm performance and corporate governance. In addition this study investigates whether there is a link between performance measures. Although many researchers have made an effort to investigate whether there is a link between ownership type and organizational performance, corporate governance and corporate performance in developed countries, the empirical evidence on these areas are weak in Sri Lanka, being a developing country and emerging economy with a unique economic situation. Another aspect of corporate performance studies are some potentially important biases related to the selection of the performance measures used in studies on corporate performance. This is due to many researchers having chosen only one or two measurement techniques out of financial/accounting, market based and production efficiency measurement techniques to measure corporate performance. Therefore different conclusions can be achieved using one or the other measures of empirical evidence. Consequently the validity of results of many studies on corporate performance in the literature is questioned (Bozec, Dia, & Breton, 2006). To overcome this problem, multi-dimensional measures are required (Carton & Hofer, 2006). Accordingly, three dimensions of performance measures (financial/accounting, market based and production efficiency) were used in this study. These performance measurement techniques have been compared to determine whether there are potential relationships among them. This study makes four significant contributions to the study of the performance of - public, private and mixed enterprises in Sri Lanka, especially via multiple approaches to address the research issue of corporate performance