Conclusions from the 9th Annual Conference in Riga, Latvia, 2001

The Public Sector Finance and Accounting Research/Working Group has been formally established at the Riga Conference. The group members presented six academic papers which dealt with fairly diverse issues in the field, from the analysis of regional public finance policies and tactics and EU initiated changes to a political economy analysis of grant transfers in a unified country. The presented papers initiated a heated and open discussion, which shed more light on different public finance practices in various CEECs. The Group has concluded that public sector finance and accounting related issues have been neglected in theory and practice, and that it is necessary to reverse the negative trends and work on the promotion of public sector accounting and finance research at the member institutions.

The Group has also laid the foundations for the preparation of the research protocol and country study guide for the project “Grant Transfers and Financial Supervision in CEECs: A Comparative Study”. The existing members of the group agreed to prepare a series of country studies based on a developed research protocol, while the Group invites other interested persons to join the team and produce a country study. The invited country studies should cover the basic issues of local government framework and the adopted logic of inter-governmental financial (fiscal) relations. This is to be followed by the thorough analysis of grant systems in a particular country. The practice of grant transfers is to be analysed from a cost-benefit point of view, and the rights and duties, both de jure and de facto, of supervisory authorities. The project, once completed, should provide a unified picture of the current practices in grant transfer systems and the ways in which the central government supervises the fiscal behaviour and practices of lower level government authorities.
 

Call for Papers

10th Annual Conference in Cracow, Poland, April 25-27, 2002

Coordinator:
Zeljko Sevic, University of Greenwich, UK
E- MAIL: Z.Sevic@gre.ac.uk

In Krakow 2002, the Working Group will present the results of its first realised project: “Grant Transfers and Financial Supervision in CEECs: A Comparative Study”. It is expected that the results will be of sufficient quality to satisfy the requirements of a Western commercial publisher who will be interested in publishing a book with the presented papers. Interested NISPAcee members and observers are invited to express their interest by sending an e-mail to Dr Zeljko Sevic (Z.Sevic@gre.ac.uk), Group Convenor in the first instance, and adhere to the adopted project protocol. The first version of the papers must be lodged with the Convenor by the end of October 2001, which will be reviewed and commented upon by early January 2002, whilst the second revised versions must be presented by early March 2002. Any eventual comments will be made known to the authors who will reply to them at the Krakow conference. The final version of the papers will be prepared by September 2002. The Group plan to propose a new research topic, for which the research protocol will be initiated in Krakow in 2002. The research protocol for the project on Grant Transfers and Financial Supervision will be produced by the end of July 2002 and will be available to all interested participants, but the chosen papers will be known in January 2002, after the first round of cross-refereeing.

As the Group is a new addition to the NISPAcee family, new members are cordially invited to join the growing and ambitious team and contribute to the shaping of the future of the Group.