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This paper examines why activity-based costing (ABC) and the balanced scorecard, two most significant accounting innovations in recent years, failed to be successfully implemented in a large tertiary education institution in New Zealand. The findings demonstrate that the implementation of both systems presented significant challenges. ABC failed because it was perceived to offer a low relative advantage, was highly complex, its implementation was not trialled, the benefits were not visible, and there was lack of communication, inadequate training and no change agent facilitating adoption. The balanced scorecard failed because the institution was caught in a performance evaluation trap with bureaucratic compliance to government requirements preventing any real improvements, adoption was symbolic to give legitimacy but suffered from a lack of rationale or logic, and there was no real observable influence on performance improvements. The politically imposed measures with an emphasis on financial performance forced the institution to play the numbers game rather than deliver 'real' performance.

Abstract.  In this paper, we analyse per capita income levels of China's three main regions: the western region, the eastern region and the central region using common cycle and common trend tests. Our main contribution is that we impose the common cycle and common trend restrictions in decomposing shocks into permanent and transitory components. We find that: (i) there is evidence for two cointegrating relationships and one common cycle; and (ii) the variance decomposition analysis of shocks provides evidence that over short horizons, permanent shocks play a large role in explaining variations in regional per capita incomes.

Abstract.  The goal of this paper is to test for asymmetric behaviour of macroeconomic aggregates for three Asian economies; namely, Malaysia, Hong Kong and Korea. Whether macroeconomic aggregates can be characterised as asymmetric has important implications for policy‐making and econometric modelling including forecasting. We examine two forms of asymmetries; specifically deepness, which arises when a detrended time series contains an asymmetric distribution, and steepness, which arises when the first difference of a series contains an asymmetric distribution. Overall, our findings suggest that for all three countries, the bulk of the series display asymmetry behaviour.