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The author comments on accounting as being instrumental in wealth distribution and in wealth creation. The author believes that accounting education in Great Britain is too concerned with the technical content and not enough with the social control of accounting and auditing. He also feels that the technical focus takes away from understanding the role of accounting in wealth creation. The author discusses accounting scandals and how they not only hurt investors but employees and creditors, too. The scandals failed to take into account the interest of the shareholders. Continued education of accountants and auditors is important in order to avoid further scandals.

This paper introduces the Tog coefficient, which can be used to measure the level of inequality in a cross-tabulation of two ordinal-level variables. The Gini coefficient is a standard measure of income inequality which has been adapted by other authors for use in different contexts such as the measurement of health inequalities and the quantification of occupational segregation; the Tog coefficient represents a further stage in this process of development. The paper outlines the construction of the Tog coefficient and illustrates this using a social mobility table based on data from the 1972 Oxford Mobility Study. The trend in social mobility-related inequality as measured by the Tog coefficient is compared with the findings of Goldthorpe et al. based on odds ratios. A more elaborate application of the Tog coefficient uses a variety of data relating to the similarity of spouses' class backgrounds to demonstrate the existence of a long-term decline in the level of inequality in British society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper compares recent developments in income inequality in Canada, Germany, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States. In addition to describing cross-national variation in changes in income inequality, the paper examines different explanatory factors for these recent developments. The findings reported indicate that there is substantial cross-national variation, not only with regard to the level of inequality, but furthermore with regard to changes in inequality. The results indicate that the equalizing effect of welfare state redistribution did not decrease in all countries. By contrast, in all countries there was a universal tendency towards increased inequality in the pre-tax and transfer distribution, although the magnitude of the change differs from country to country. Even though a polarization of the earnings distribution is reported, the results still give no support to cross-national convergence with regard to income inequality during the 1980s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is therefore to establish those variables which may be seen as being important in determining the distribution of short-time working and to test an econometric model that explains the distribution of TST across British industry. The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. Section II attempts to outline the most important of the influences that affected the incidence of the short-time scheme. Empirical results are presented and discussed in Section III. Finally, Section IV offers a summary and some general conclusions about the work reported here. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The resource allocation procedure for distributing money among and within British universities has changed substantially in recent years, and with it the preferred management style. Performance indicators have been proposed as important statistics to be used in the management of resource allocation. The validity and value of such indicators is discussed in the context of the recent changes and their limited role within a proper system of appraisal identified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we offer both long run and international perspectives on consumption in interwar Britain. We conclude firstly that consumer behaviour over the last century has been very stable and can be explained by economic variables. Secondly, we show that the stability of consumption in Britain during the Great Depression compared with the sharp fall in consumption in America can be partly explained by the divergent behaviour of real wealth in the two countries. Thirdly, the emphasis of orthodox economic historians on the global effects of new products, demographic and distributional factors is shown to be misplaced. Aggregate consumption can be adequately explained by the standard economic variables, income and the price level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]