PhD defense: Development of public sector and accounting issues in Hong Kong
On Tuesday 19 October Na Zhou will hold a trial lecture on a prescribed topic and defend her thesis for the PhD degree at NHH.
Hong Kong was a British colony for over 150 years before it was returned to China as a Special Administrative Region in 1997. The governing principle behind the handover was formulated as "One country, two systems". The combination of a market-oriented economy in Hong Kong and the communist political system in China makes Hong Kong unique.
Previously, the topic of public sector reforms in Hong Kong has been studied mainly from a political science perspective with a strong focus on the political and administrative features of the reforms. Little, if any, is known about Hong Kong's public sector accounting issues in the English-speaking literature. To fill in this gap, the thesis investigates the development of public sector accounting in Hong Kong since the 1970s.
The thesis consists of three essays. In the first essay, Zhou studies how accounting reforms have interacted with the context in which they occur. The main finding is that before the handover in 1997, accounting reforms were the main focus of Hong Kong's public sector reforms. The patterns of the reforms were significantly determined by the external environment (United Kingdom). After 1997, the internal environment (the Hong Kong political system) has played a greater role, and the focus on the accounting reforms has been reduced to a great extent.
In the second essay, Zhou investigates the development of Hong Kong's public financial management reforms based on the New Public Financial Management (NPFM) framework. She finds that the NPFM reforms in Hong Kong are broad in scale, but not comprehensive in their degree of implementation.
In the third essay, Zhou carries out a functionalistic analysis of Hong Kong's governmental accounting and financial reporting system, and discusses some potential problems caused by the current dual accounting system.
As a whole the thesis contributes by increasing in general the comprehension of the new public financial management reform implemented in Hong Kong and more specifically the accounting change related to these changes.
Prescribed topic for the trial lecture: Ideology and driving forces of NPFM (New Public Financial Management) reforms and their implications on changes in government accounting in East-Asian countries
Time of the trial lecture: Tuesday 19 October 10:15 in Karl Borch's Auditorium, NHH
Title of the thesis: Development of public sector and accounting issues in Hong Kong since the 1970s
Time and place for the defense: Tuesday 19 October 12:15 in Karl Borch's Auditorium, NHH
Principal supervisor: Professor Norvald Monsen, NHH
Members of the evaluation committee:
Associate Professor Katarina Östergren, NHH, chairperson
Professor Vicente Montesinos Julve, University of Valencia
Professor Anatoli Bourmistrov, Bodø University College