Search

Reforms to the British navy’s estimates for 1888—9 radically changed the way that budgetary information was presented to parliament. Motivated by a desire to facilitate efficiency judgments about public expenditure, in the new-style estimates expenditure was classified according to object or purpose rather than on the basis of the traditional subjective categorizations. These reforms were instituted, in the face of strong Treasury opposition, almost as a fait accompli, by Mr Arthur Forwood (later Sir Arthur Forwood, Bt), Parliamentary and Financial Secretary to the Navy, supported by his senior minister, Lord George Hamilton, First Lord of the Admiralty, both of whom possessed unusually advanced ideas about public-sector efficiency and management. The article examines the background to and nature of the reforms and the unusual dynamics of the reform process, as well as attempting to ascertain their wider place in the history of governmental budgeting and accounting. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Lloyd George-appointed Committee on National Expenditure (Geddes Committee), charged with reducing projected 1922—3 Supply Expenditure by £100m comprised outstanding businessmen who employed an extraordinary range of techniques and approaches, some of great antiquity (but nowadays thought to be “modern”), and others genuinely novel, to lay the groundwork for returning British public expenditure to a peace-time footing following a post-Armistice budgetary crisis. Drawing mostly on documents lodged at the UK National Archives, the methodologies and political, institutional and behavioural dynamics of Committee operations are analysed to show how it achieved arguably the most profound analysis of British public expenditure ever undertaken. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The following review of Lou Goldberg's last work-Goldberg, L., (ed. by Leech, S.A.), (2001), A Journey into Accounting Thought, London: Routledge, ISBN 0-415-26021-3 - was commissioned by the editor. This review, written in the first person, draws inter alia on personal knowledge to examine Journey both as a stand-alone publication and as part of Lou's broader oeuvre. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper contests a key plank of Fleischman and Tyson's (2000) analysis of racism in Hawaiian sugar plantations, arguing that their assumption that the lack of individual productivity records in plantation archives denotes racism is misconceived and that the absence of these data has a transaction-cost explanation. The opportunity is taken to extend the analysis to the sugar industries of Florida and Queensland, finding racism in both, but only implicating accounting in the former. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

For various forms of assistance the authors are indebted to Phil Cobbin, Jane Hronsky, Christine Jubb, Denis Pratt, Tom Rowles, Ken Wright and participants in seminar series at the universities of Melbourne and Manchester. We owe a particular debt to Wayland Young (second Baron Kennel) for permitting access to the Kennel papers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]