公共资金审计和管理中英文对照外文翻译文献
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企业资金管理中英文对照外文翻译文献(文档含英文原文和中文翻译)An Analysis of Working Capital Management Results Across IndustriesAbstractFirms are able to reduce financing costs and/or increase the fund s available for expansion by minimizing the amount of funds tied upin current assets. We provide insights into the performance of surv eyed firms across key components of working capital management by usi ng the CFO magazine’s annual Working CapitalManagement Survey. We discover that significant differences exist b etween industries in working capital measures across time.In addition.w e discover that these measures for working capital change significantl y within industries across time.IntroductionThe importance of efficient working capital management is indisputa ble. Working capital is the difference between resources in cash or readily convertible into cash (Current Assets) and organizational commi tments for which cash will soon be required (Current Liabilities). Th e objective of working capital management is to maintain the optimum balance of each of the working capital components. Business viabilit y relies on the ability to effectively manage receivables. inventory.a nd payables. Firms are able to reduce financing costs and/or increase the funds available for expansion by minimizing the amount of funds tied up in current assets. Much managerial effort is expended in b ringing non-optimal levels of current assets and liabilities back towa rd optimal levels. An optimal level would be one in which a balance is achieved between risk and efficiency.A recent example of business attempting to maximize working capita l management is the recurrent attention being given to the applicatio n of Six Sigma®methodology. Six S igma®methodologies help companies measure and ensure quality in all areas of the enterprise. When used to identify and rectify discrepancies.inefficiencies and erroneous tra nsactions in the financial supply chain. Six Sigma®reduces Days Sale s Outstanding (DSO).accelerates the payment cycle.improves customer sati sfaction and reduces the necessary amount and cost of working capital needs. There appear to be many success stories including Jennifertwon’s(2002) report of a 15percent decrease in days that sales are outstanding.resulting in an increased cash flow of approximately $2 million at Thibodaux Regional Medical Cenrer.Furthermore bad debts declined from 3.4millin to $6000000.However.Waxer’s(2003)study of multiple firms employing Six Sig ma®finds that it is really a “get rich slow”technique with a r ate of return hovering in the 1.2 – 4.5 percent range.Even in a business using Six Sigma®methodology. an “optimal”level of working capital management needs to be identified. Industry factors may impa ct firm credit policy.inventory management.and bill-paying activities. S ome firms may be better suited to minimize receivables and inventory. while others maximize payables. Another aspect of “optimal”is the extent to which poor financial results can be tied to sub-optimal pe rformance.Fortunately.these issues are testable with data published by CFO magazine. which claims to be the source of “tools and informati on for the financial executive.”and are the subject of this resear ch.In addition to providing mean and variance values for the working capital measures and the overall metric.two issues will be addressed in this research. One research question is. “are firms within a p articular industry clustered together at consistent levels of working capital measures?For instance.are firms in one industry able to quickl y transfer sales into cash.while firms from another industry tend to have high sales levels for the particular level of inventory . The other research question is. “does working capital management perform ance for firms within a given industry change from year-to-year?”The following section presents a brief literature review.Next.the r esearch method is described.including some information about the annual Working Capital Management Survey published by CFO magazine. Findings are then presented and conclusions are drawn.Related LiteratureThe importance of working capital management is not new to the f inance literature. Over twenty years ago. Largay and Stickney (1980) reported that the then-recent bankruptcy of W.T. Grant. a nationwide chain of department stores.should have been anticipated because the co rporation had been running a deficit cash flow from operations for e ight of the last ten years of its corporate life.As part of a stud y of the Fortune 500s financial management practices. Gilbert and Rei chert (1995) find that accounts receivable management models are used in 59 percent of these firms to improve working capital projects.wh ile inventory management models were used in 60 percent of the compa nies.More recently. Farragher. Kleiman and Sahu (1999) find that 55 p ercent of firms in the S&P Industrial index complete some form of a cash flow assessment. but did not present insights regarding account s receivable and inventory management. or the variations of any curre nt asset accounts or liability accounts across industries.Thus.mixed ev idence exists concerning the use of working capital management techniq ues.Theoretical determination of optimal trade credit limits are the s ubject of many articles over the years (e.g. Schwartz 1974; Scherr 1 996).with scant attention paid to actual accounts receivable management.Across a limited sample. Weinraub and Visscher (1998) observe a tend ency of firms with low levels of current ratios to also have low l evels of current liabilities. Simultaneously investigating accounts rece ivable and payable issues.Hill. Sartoris.and Ferguson (1984) find diffe rences in the way payment dates are defined. Payees define the date of payment as the date payment is received.while payors view paymen t as the postmark date.Additional WCM insight across firms.industries.a nd time can add to this body of research.Maness and Zietlow (2002. 51. 496) presents two models of value creation that incorporate effective short-term financial management acti vities.However.these models are generic models and do not consider uni que firm or industry influences. Maness and Zietlow discuss industry influences in a short paragraph that includes the observation that. “An industry a company is located in may have more influence on th at company’s fortunes than overall GNP”(2002. 507).In fact. a car eful review of this 627-page textbook finds only sporadic information on actual firm levels of WCM dimensions.virtually nothing on industr y factors except for some boxed items with titles such as. “Should a Retailer Offer an In-House Credit Card”(128) and nothing on WC M stability over time. This research will attempt to fill this void by investigating patterns related to working capital measures within industries and illustrate differences between industries across time.An extensive survey of library and Internet resources provided ver y few recent reports about working capital management. The most relev ant set of articles was Weisel and Bradley’s (2003) article on cash flow management and one of inventory control as a result of effect ive supply chain management by Hadley (2004).Research Method The CFO RankingsThe first annual CFO Working Capital Survey. a joint project with REL Consultancy Group.was published in the June 1997 issue of CFO (Mintz and Lezere 1997). REL is a London. England-based management co nsulting firm specializing in working capital issues for its global l ist of clients. The original survey reports several working capital b enchmarks for public companies using data for 1996. Each company is ranked against its peers and also against the entire field of 1.000 companies. REL continues to update the original information on an a nnual basis.REL uses the “cash flow from operations”value located on firm cash flow statements to estimate cash conversion efficiency (CCE). T his value indicates how well a company transforms revenues into cash flow. A “days of working capital”(DWC) value is based on the d ollar amount in each of the aggregate.equally-weighted receivables.inven tory.and payables accounts. The “days of working capital”(DNC) repr esents the time period between purchase of inventory on acccount fromvendor until the sale to the customer.the collection of the receiva bles. and payment receipt.Thus.it reflects the companys ability to fin ance its core operations with vendor credit. A detailed investigation of WCM is possible because CFO also provides firm and industry val ues for days sales outstanding (A/R).inventory turnover.and days payabl es outstanding (A/P).Research FindingsAverage and Annual Working Capital Management Performance Working capital management component definitions and average values for the entire 1996 –2000 period .Across the nearly 1.000 firms in the survey.cash flow from operations. defined as cash flow from operations divided by sales and referred to as “cash conversion ef ficiency”(CCE).averages 9.0 percent.Incorporating a 95 percent confide nce interval. CCE ranges from 5.6 percent to 12.4 percent. The days working capital (DWC). defined as the sum of receivables and invent ories less payables divided by daily sales.averages 51.8 days and is very similar to the days that sales are outstanding (50.6).because the inventory turnover rate (once every 32.0 days) is similar to the number of days that payables are outstanding (32.4 days).In all ins tances.the standard deviation is relatively small.suggesting that these working capital management variables are consistent across CFO report s.Industry Rankings on Overall Working Capital Management Perfo rmanceCFO magazine provides an overall working capital ranking for firms in its ing the following equation:Industry-based differences in overall working capital management are presented for the twenty-s ix industries that had at least eight companies included in the rank ings each year.In the typical year. CFO magazine ranks 970 companies during this period. Industries are listed in order of the mean ove rall CFO ranking of working capital performance. Since the best avera ge ranking possible for an eight-company industry is 4.5 (this assume s that the eight companies are ranked one through eight for the ent ire survey). it is quite obvious that all firms in the petroleum in dustry must have been receiving very high overall working capital man agement rankings.In fact.the petroleum industry is ranked first in CCE and third in DWC (as illustrated in Table 5 and discussed later i n this paper).Furthermore.the petroleum industry had the lowest standar d deviation of working capital rankings and range of working capital rankings. The only other industry with a mean overall ranking less than 100 was the Electric & Gas Utility industry.which ranked secon d in CCE and fourth in DWC. The two industries with the worst work ing capital rankings were Textiles and Apparel. Textiles rank twenty-s econd in CCE and twenty-sixth in DWC. The apparel industry ranks twenty-third and twenty-fourth in the two working capital measures ConclusionsThe research presented here is based on the annual ratings of wo rking capital management published in CFO magazine. Our findings indic ate a consistency in how industries “stack up”against each other over time with respect to the working capital measures.However.the wor king capital measures themselves are not static (i.e.. averages of wo rking capital measures across all firms change annually); our results indicate significant movements across our entire sample over time. O ur findings are important because they provide insight to working cap ital performance across time. and on working capital management across industries. These changes may be in explained in part by macroecono mic factors Changes in interest rates.rate of innovation.and competitio n are likely to impact working capital management. As interest rates rise.there would be less desire to make payments early.which would stretch accounts payable.accounts receivable.and cash accounts. The ra mifications of this study include the finding of distinct levels of WCM measures for different industries.which tend to be stable over ti me. Many factors help to explain this discovery. The improving econom y during the period of the study may have resulted in improved turn over in some industries.while slowing turnover may have been a signal of troubles ahead. Our results should be interpreted cautiously. Our study takes places over a short time frame during a generally impr oving market. In addition. the survey suffers from survivorship bias –only the top firms within each industry are ranked each year and the composition of those firms within the industry can change annua lly.Further research may take one of two lines.First.there could bea study of whether stock prices respond to CFO magazine’s publication of working capital management rating.Second,there could be a study of which if any of the working capital management components relate to share price performance.Given our results,there studies need to take industry membership into consideration when estimating stock price reaction to working capital management performance.对整个行业中营运资金管理的研究格雷格Filbeck.Schweser学习计划托马斯M克鲁格.威斯康星大学拉克罗斯摘要:企业能够降低融资成本或者尽量减少绑定在流动资产上的成立基金数额来用于扩大现有的资金。
附录A国际审计准那么第910号:财务报表审阅〔一〕引言1.本准那么旨在为审计人员接受委托从事财务报表审阅的职业责任,以及出具审阅报告的格式和内容建立标准,提供指导。
2.本准那么是针对财务报表审阅制定的。
然而,它也适用于审阅财务信息或其他信息的业务。
本准那么要连同国际审计准那么120号“国际审计准那么框架〞一并阅读。
其他国际审计准那么的有关内容对审计人员运用这一谁那么可以有所帮助。
审阅业务的目的3.财务报表审阅的目的是为了使审计人员能够说明,根据实施的程序(这些程序并不提供象在审计业务中所要求获取的所有证据),是否存在审计人员注意到的,使得审计人员认为财务报表在所有重大方面没有按照指明的财务报告框架编制的情况(消极保证)。
审阅业务的一般原那么4.审计人员应当遵循国际会计师联合会公布的“职业会计师道德守那么〞。
统驭审计人员职业责任的道德原那么是:(I)独立;(2)公正;(3)客观;(4)职业胜任能力及应有关注;(5)保密;(6)职业行为;(7)技术准那么。
5.审计人员应当按照本准那么执行审阅工作。
6.审计人员应当以职业疑心的态度方案和执行审阅工作,以识别可能存在的导致财务报表重大错报的情况。
7.为了在审阅报告中发表消极保证的意见,审计人员应当主要通过查询和分析程序获取充分、适当的证据,形成结论。
审阅范围8.“审阅范围〞是指为了实现审阅目的,在各种情况下认为必要的审阅程序。
执行财务报表审阅所要求的程序,由审计人员根据国际审计准那么、有关专业团体、法律和法规的要求,以及审阅业务约定条件及报告要求确定。
适当的保证9.审阅业务提供了一个适当程度的保证,即审阅的信息不存在重大的错报,这是用消极保证的方式发表意见。
业务约定条款10.审计人员和客户应当就业务约定条款达成一致意见。
达成一致的条款应当记录在业务委托书或其他适当的类似合同中。
11.业务委托书有助于制定审阅工作方案。
审计人员致送记录委托关键条款的业务委托书,对客户和审计人员均有益处。
基金管理外文文献翻译(含:英文原文及中文译文)文献出处:英文原文Is Money Really “Smart”? New Evidence on the Relation Between Mutual Fund Flows, Manager Behavior, and Performance PersistenceRuss WermersMutual fund returns strongly persist over multi-year periods—that is the central finding of this paper. Further, consumer and fund manager behavior both play a large role in explaining these longterm continuation patterns—consumers invest heavily in last-year’s winning funds, and managers of these winners invest these inflows in momentum stocks to continue to outperform other funds for at least two years following the ranking year. By contrast, managers of losing funds appear reluctant to sell their losing stocks to finance the purchase of new momentum stocks, perhaps due to a disposition effect. Thus, momentum continues to separate winning from losing managers for a much longer period than indicated by prior studies.Even more surprising is that persistence in winning fund returns is not entirely explained by momentum—we find strong evidence that flow-related buying, especially among growth-oriented funds, pushes up stock prices. Specifically, stocks that winning funds purchase in responseto persistent flows have returns that beat their size, book-to-market, and momentum benchmarks by two to three percent per year over a four-year period. Cross-sectional regressions indicate that these abnormal returns are strongly related to fund inflows, but not to the past performance of the funds—thus, casting some doubt on prior findings of persistent manager talent in picking stocks. Finally, at the style-adjusted net returns level, we find no persistence, consistent with the results of prior studies. On balance, we confirm that money is smart in chasing winning managers, but that a “copycat” s trategy of mimicking winning fund stock trades to take advantage of flow-related returns appears to be the smartest strategy.Eighty-eight million individuals now hold investments in U.S. mutual funds, with over 90 percent of the value of these investments being held in actively managed funds. Further, actively managed equity funds gain the lion’s share of consumer inflows—flows of net new money to equity funds (inflows minus outflows) totalled $309 billion in 2000, pushing the aggregate value of investments held by these funds to almost $4 trillion at year-end 2000. While the majority of individual investors apparently believe in the virtues of active management in general, many appear to hold even stronger beliefs concerning the talents of subgroups of fund managers—they appear to believe that, among the field of active managers, superior managers exist that can “beat the market” for long periods of time. In particular, Morningstar and Lipper compete vigorouslyfor the attention of these true believers by providing regular fund performance rankings, while popular publications such as Money Magazine routinely profile “star” mutual fund managers. In addition, investor dollars, while not very quick to abandon past losing funds, aggressively chase past winners (see, for example, Sirri and Tufano (1998)).Are these “performance-chasers” wasting their money and time, or is money “smart”? Several past papers have attempted to tackle this issue, with somewhat differing results. For example, Grinblatt and Titman (1989a, 1993) find that some mutual fund managers are able to consistently earn positive abnormal returns before fees and expenses, while Brown and Goetzmann (1995; BG) attribute persistence to inferior funds consistently earning negative abnormal returns. Gruber (1996) and Zheng (1999) examine persistence from the viewpoint of consumer money flows to funds, and find that money is “smart”—that is, money flows disproportionately to funds exhibiting superior future returns. However, the exact source of the smart money effect remains a puzzle—does smart money capture manager talent or, perhaps, simply momentum in stock returns?1 More recently, Carhart (1997) examines the persistence in net returns of U.S. mutual funds, controlling for the continuation attributable to priced equity styles (see, for example, Fama and French (1992, 1993, 1996), Jegadeesh and Titman (1993), Daniel andTitman (1997), and Moskowitz and Grinblatt (1999)). Carhart finds little evidence of superior funds that consistently outperform their style benchmarks—specifically, Carhart finds that funds in the highest net return decile (of the CRSP mutual fund database) during one year beat funds in the lowest decile by about 3.5 percent during the following year, almost all due to the one-year momentum effect documented by Jegadeesh and Titman (1993) and to the unexplained poor performance of funds in the lowest prior-year return decile.2 Thus, Carhart (1997) suggests that money is not very smart. Recent studies find somewhat more promising results than Carhart (1997). Chen, Jegadeesh, and Wermers (1999) find that stocks most actively purchased by funds beat those most actively sold by over two percent per year, while Bollen and Busse (2002) find evidence of persistence in quarterly fund performance. Wermers (2000) finds that, although the average style-adjusted net return of the average mutual fund is negative (consistent with Carhart’s study), high-turnover funds exhibit a net return that is significantly higher than low-turnover funds. In addition, these highturnover funds pick stocks well enough to cover their costs, even adjusting for style-based returns. This finding suggests that fund managers who trade more frequently have persistent stockpicking talents. All of these papers provide a more favorable view of the average actively managed fund than prior research, although none focus on the persistence issue with portfolio holdings data.This study examines the mutual fund persistence issue using both portfolio holdings and net returns data, allowing a more complete analysis of the issue than past studies. With these data, we develop measures that allow us to examine the roles of consumer inflows and fund manager behavior in the persistence of fund performance. Specifically, we decompose the returns and costs of each mutual fund into that attributable to (1) manager skills in picking stocks having returns that beat their style-based benchmarks (selectivity), (2) returns that are attributable to the characteristics (or style) of stockholdings, (3) trading costs, (4) expenses, and (5) costs that are associated with the daily liquidity offered by funds to the investing public (as documented by Edelen (1999)). Further, we construct holdings-based measures of momentum-investing behavior by the fund managers. Together, these measures allow an examination of the relation between flows, manager behavior, and performance persistence.In related work, Sirri and Tufano (1998) find that consumer flows react about as strongly to one-year lagged net returns as to any other fund characteristic. In addition, the model of Lynch and Musto (2002) predicts that performance repeats among winners (but not losers), while the model of Berk and Green (2002) predicts no persistence (or weak persistence) as consumer flows compete away any managerial talent. Consistent with Sirri and Tufano (1998), and to test the competing viewpoints of Lynchand Musto (2002) and Berk and Green (2002), we sort funds on their one-year lagged net returns for most tests in this paper. While other ways of sorting funds are attempted.DataWe merge two major mutual fund databases for our analysis of mutual fund performance. Details on the process of merging these databases is available in Wermers (2000). The first database contains quarterly portfolio holdings for all U.S. equity mutual funds existing at any time between January 1, 1975 and December 31, 1994; these data were purchased from Thomson/CDA of Rockville, Maryland. The CDA dataset lists the equity portion of each fund’s holdings (i.e., the shareholdings of each stock held by that fund) along with a listing of the total net assets under management and the self-declared investment objective at the beginning of each calendar quarter. CDA began collecting investment-objective information on June 30, 1980; we supplement these data with hand-collected investment objective data from January 1, 1975.The second mutual fund database is available from the Center for Research in Security Prices (CRSP) and is used by Carhart (1997). The CRSP database contains monthly data on net returns, as well as annual data on portfolio turnover and expense ratios for all mutual funds existing at any time between January 1, 1962 and December 31, 2000. Further details on the CRSP mutual fund database are available from CRSP.These two databases were merged to provide a complete record of the stockholdings of a given fund, along with the fund’s turnover, expense ratio, net returns, investment objective, and total net assets under management during the entire time that the fund existed during our the period of 1975 to 1994 (inclusive).5 Finally, stock prices and returns were obtained from the CRSP stock files.Performance-Decomposition Methodology In this study, we use several measures that quantify the ability of a mutual fund manager to choose stocks, as well as to generate superior performance at the net return level. These measures, in general, decompose the return of the stocks held by a mutual fund into several components in order to both benchmark the stock portfolio and to provide a performance attribution for the fund. The measures used to decompose fund returns include:1. the portfolio-weighted return on stocks currently held by the fund, in excess of returns (during the same time period) on matched control portfolios having the same style characteristics (selectivity)2. the portfolio-weighted return on control portfolios having the same characteristics as stocks currently held by the fund, in excess of time-series average returns on those control portfolios (style timing)3. the time-series average returns on control portfolios having the same characteristics as stocks currently held (style-based returns)4. the execution costs incurred by the fund5. the expense ratio charged by the fund6. the net returns to investors in the fund, in excess of the returns to an appropriate benchmark portfolio.The first three components of performance, which decompose the return on the stocks held by a given mutual fund before any trading costs or expenses are considered, are briefly described next. We estimate the execution costs of each mutual fund during each quarter by applying recent research on institutional trading costs to our stockholdings data—we also describe this procedure below. Data on expense ratios and net returns are obtained directly from the merged mutual fund database. Finally, we describe the Carhart (1997) regression-based performance measure, which we use to benchmark-adjust net returns.The Ferson-Schadt Measure Ferson and Schadt (FS, 1996) develop a conditional performance measure at the net returns level. In essence, this measure identifies a fund manager as providing value if the manager provides excess net returns that are significantly higher than the fund’s matched factor benchmarks, both unconditional and conditional. The conditional benchmarks control for any predictability of the factor return premia that is due to evolving public information. Managers, therefore, are only labeled as superior if they possess superior private information on stock prices, and not if they change factor loadings over time in response to public information. FS also find that these conditionalbenchmarks help to control for the response of consumer cashflows to mutual funds. For example, when public information indicates that the market return will be unusually high, consumers invest unusually high amounts of cash into mutual funds, which reduces the performance measure, “alpha,” from an unconditional model (such as the Carhart model). This reduction in alpha occurs because the unconditional model does not control for the negative market timing induced by the flows. Edelen (1999) provides further evidence of a negative impact of flows on measured fund performance. Using the FS model mitigates this flow-timing effect. The version of the FS model used in this paper starts with the unconditional Carhart four-factor model and adds a market factor that is conditioned on the five FS economic variables.Decomposing the Persistence in Mutual Fund ReturnsSirri and Tufano (1998) find that consumer flows react about as strongly to one-year lagged net returns as to any other fund characteristic. In addition, the model of Lynch and Musto (2002) predicts that performance repeats among winners (but not losers), while the model of Berk and Green (2002) predicts no persistence (or weak persistence) as consumer flows compete away any managerial talent. Consistent with Sirri and Tufano (1998), and to test the competing viewpoints of Lynch and Musto (2002) and Berk and Green (2002), we sort funds on their one-year lagged net returns for the majority of tests in the remainder ofthis paper. When appropriate, we provide results for other sorting approaches as well.中文译文资金真的是“聪明”吗?关于共同基金流动,经理行为和绩效持续性关系的新证据作者:Russ Wermers此外,基金的复苏在多年期间强烈持续- 这是本文的核心发现。
中英文翻译内部控制爆炸①摘要:Power的1997版书以审计社会为主题的探讨使得审计活动在联合王国(英国)和北美得到扩散。
由审计爆炸一同带动的是内部控制制度的兴起。
审计已经从审计结果转向审计制度和内部控制,它已然成为公众对公司治理和审计监管政策的辩论主题。
Power表示对什么是有效的内部控制各方说法不一。
本人对内部控制研究方面有一个合理的解释。
内部控制对非常不同概念的各个领域的会计进行探究,并研究如何控制不同水平的组织。
因此,内部控制研究的各类之间的交叉影响是有限的,而且,许多内部会计控制是研究是再更宽广的公司治理问题的背景下进行的。
所以,许多有关内部控制制度对公司治理的价值观点扔需要进行研究。
关键词:机构理论;公司治理;外部审计;内部审计;内部控制制度;管理控制1 概述Power的1997版书以审计社会为主题的探讨使得审计活动在联合王国(英国)和北美得到扩散。
由审计爆炸一同带动的是内部控制制度的兴起。
审计已经从审计结果转向审①Maastricht Accounting and Auditing Research and Education Center (MARC), Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, Universiteit Maastricht, P.O. Box 616, 6200 MD Maastricht, The Netherlands s.maijoor@marc.unimaas.nl Fax: 31-43-3884876 Tel: 31-43-3883783计制度和内部控制,它已然成为公众对公司治理和审计监管政策的辩论主题。
例如,在最近的对于欧洲联盟内外部审计服务的内部市场形成的辩论中,监管建议建立关于内部控制和内部审计制度。
虽然对有关内部控制的价值期望高,但Power表示对什么是有效的内部控制各方说法不一。
本人对内部控制研究方面有一个合理的解释。
Ⅲ.外文翻译外文翻译之一The focus of working capital managementin UK small firms(节选)Author:Carole Howorth,Paul WestheadNationality:Nottingham NG8 1BB, UKDerivation: Management Accounting Research NO.14,20XX, PP.94–111 AbstractWorking capital management routines of a large random sample of small panies in the UK are examined. Considerable variability in the take-up of 11 working capital management routines was detected. Principal ponents analysis and cluster a nalysis confirm the identification of four distinct ‘types’ of panies with regard to patterns of working capital management. The first three ‘types’ of panies focused upon cash management, stock or debtors routines respectively, whilst the fourth ‘type’ we re less likely to take-up any working capital management routines. Influences on the amount and focus of working capital management are discussed. Multinomial logistic regression analysis suggests that the selected independent variables successfully discriminated between the four ‘types’ of panies. The results suggest that small panies focus only on areas of working capital management where they expect to improve marginal returns. The difficulties of establishing causality are highlighted and implications for academics, policy-makers and practitioners are reported.Conclusions and implicationsThe aim of this study has been to encourage additional research, rather than to provide an exhaustive review of all the factors associated with the take-up of working capital management routines by small panies. Three theories guided the selection of the independent variables explored in this study. The RBV highlighted that small firms have idiosyncratic bundles of resources associated with the take-up of working capital management routines. Agency theory identified the influence of external stakeholders as well as differences between small and large firms. Transactions costs theory indicated that small firms might invest resources in specific areas of working capital management if they perceive them to offer the highest marginal return.The results consistently highlighted, across a variety of statistical tests, that small firms are not a homogenous group with regard to working capital management routines. Considerable variability was detected in the take-up of 11 working capital management routines by a large random sample of small panies in the UK. Evidence from the PCA and the cluster analysis confirmed the identification of four distinct ‘types’ of panies with reg ard to the take-up of working capital management routines. Moreover, evidence from themultinomial logistic regression analysis suggests that the selected independent variables successfully discriminated between the four ‘types’ of panies. Twelve out of the 18 hypotheses were supported. A further two hypotheses showed the anticipated relationship but were not significant discriminators between the ‘types’ of panies.Evidence that the majority of small panies focus their efforts on one area of working capital management indicates that resources for working capital management are limited. However, a striking finding from the regression analysis was the detection that firms which utilize fewer working capital management routines were not necessarily smaller panies. We can infer here that resource constraints per se may not be the major barrier to the utilization of working capital management routines by smaller panies. Instead, the results provide an indication that the perceived marginal return on mitting resources may be a major influence on the extent and focus of working capital management.However, we acknowledge that a cross-sectional study such as this one cannot establish causality and can only provide an indication of associations that warrant further investigation. Additional studies could usefully explore the stimuli leading to the utilisation of working capital management routines and the barriers to their take-up. The dynamics of working capital management are plex and the links with performance are bidirectional and difficult to unravel. Small panies may invest resources into managing a particular area of working capital where they are performing badly because the returns from controlling the problem area are perceived to be high. If the direction of causality is not understood, an overly simplistic conclusion in this instance could be that investment of more resources into an area leads to worse performance. The plexity of causality makes it difficult to establish the effect of working capital management routines on the performance of the firm. We can infer that firms with a lower propensity to undertake working capital management routines are not significantly associated with increased cash flow problems, nor reduced profitability. There is some indi cation that these may be ‘lifestyle’ firms but additional research is required before firm conclusions can be drawn. Currently, it is not clear whether these laggard working capital firms are underperforming or have untapped potential for growth.In a similar way, the direction of causality is not clear with regard to the link between the take-up of working capital management routines and the level of financial skills in a firm. This study employed a simple proxy measure of financial sophistication. Further research is warranted to investigate the direction and the strength of the links between the take-up of working capital management routines and financial management skills and training, education and prior experience. Additional multivariate statistical studies are also required in a variety of national, cultural and industrial contexts to identify the bination of internal and external environmental factors associated with the take-up of working capital management routines by different employment sizebands of private firms (i.e. micro, small, medium and large).Qualitative studies and longitudinal research will provide fresh insights into the processes and dynamics of working capital management, as well as the plex strands of causality (Scapens, 1990).Policy-makers and practitioners seeking to increase the stock of professionally managed firms, might need to target their assistance towards owners of small firms who face attitudinal, resource and operational barriers to the utilization of working capital management routines. Presented evidence suggests that small panies should not be viewed as a homo generous entity with regard to their working capital management routines.Policy-makers and practitioners need to appreciate this diversity and they may use the presented evidence to tailor assistance to the needs of particular ‘types’ of panies, rather than providing ‘blanket” support to all firms irrespective of aspirations or resources.Policy-makers and practitioners need to appreciate the management time constraint faced by many small firms. Time constraints not only limit the amount of time for working capital management , but also the amount of time available to assess whether changes to current working capital management policy would be worthwhile. Moreover, we might expect improved skills to lead to more efficient use of time but small firm managers will require powerful evidence to convince them of the benefits of investing time in financial skills training. The take-up of routines (and financial skills training) could be increased if it was conclusively confirmed that firms significantly improve their performance after introducing appropriate working capital management routines. Additional longitudinal, qualitative and multivariate statistical evidence is warranted that explores whether the take-up of working capital management routines by small firms is subsequently associated with superior levels of performance. Best business practice evidence, from case studies, could also be utilised by policy-makers and practitioners to convince more owners of small firms of how specific working capital management routines can be used proactively to address constraints on business development. There is clearly a need for a great deal more research in this area before the dynamics of working capital management are well understood.英国小企业运营资金管理重点(节选)作者:Carole Howorth,Paul Westhead国籍:Nottingham NG8 1BB, UK原文出处: Management Accounting Research NO.14,20XX,PP.94–111摘要从英国小公司中大量的随机抽样,并检查它们的运营资金管理模式。
外文文献翻译译文一、外文原文原文:Subnational Public Financial Management: Institutions andMacroeconomic ConsiderationsTransparent public financial management at the subnational level requires institutions and processes that mirror those needed at the central government level, in order to generate better accountability and competition among different subnational governments, critical elements in ensuring good governance and efficiency of decentralized administrations. Further subnational debt also has implications for overall macroeconomic stability that concerns the central government. The key components are identified, with a particular focus on subnational debt monitoring and management.Practical issues relating to effective public financial management ultimately govern whether or not there is good governance at the subnational level-hence the success or failure of different policy options. Although there is a growing literature on "fiscal rules" and subnational debt management, there has been less attention to the critical governance aspects of public financial management (although see Potter 1997, Momoniat,2001).Part of this neglect may be due to the presumption that decentralization, together with community-based decision making, would suffice in generating efficient and equitable spending decisions.Indeed, the emphasis on community participation was a feature of development strategy in the 1950s, largely driven by the Ford Foundation and U.S. foreign assistance programs. Despite a lack of significant success at the time, there has been a resurgence of the policy in recent years due to the efforts of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs).The emphasis on community-driven development was adopted as one of the cornerstones of the World Bank's Comprehensive DevelopmentFramework (World Bank, 2001). However, there is increasing evidence that weak or absent public financial management functions and institutions are likely to negate any advantages that might be inherent in bringing public services "closer" to local communities.The underpinnings of public financial management relate to the basic institutional and procedural elements that might be enshrined in a constitution, or higher level laws on the budget, or laws or agreements governing subnational operations or levels of indebtedness. In some countries, such as South Africa, where the process has been nicely sequenced, there is a set of consistent and well designed legislation covering all the areas mentioned above.In order for any level of government to take responsibility for its actions, there must be clarity in its functions, its mechanisms for appropriating funds and prioritizing and authorizing spending, and ensuring that the spending is actually carried out and accounted for. Another critical aspect relates to timely and accurate reporting to the respective legislature and any higher levels of administration. In short, questions would need to be posed concerning the transparency and accountability of a government and whether these meet minimum international standards. Quite often the consequences of subnational spending can be shifted to higher levels of government, or across generations, if there is no hard-budget constraint at a junior level of government (Rodmen, Laidback, and Eskelund, 2003). This generally translates into weak or nonexistent control over borrowing. The borrowing might be explicit, for example, through issuance of debt or contracting of loans, or indirect, such as though the buildup of arrears or accounts payable. Under different constitutional arrangements, policy responses vary from enforced controls over subnational borrowing (generally in unitary states) to voluntary agreements or rules (in federations, as well as in supranational conglomerations of states, such as the EU),to sole reliance on the strictures of the market.The case for community-based governance depends on the possibilities of local information generation together with the networks of inter-community interactions or social capital. The combination of these factors could, in principle, generate spendingtailored to local needs, with substantive local interactions in order to ensure that funds are not diverted from expressed objectives. And as stated above, international and donor agencies have raised these possibilities in the design of assistance programs. But, in practice, there are two substantives in difficulties. The first relates to whether or not there might be elite capture, and the second, that would serve to reinforce the first, relates to the type of information that is generated. In the final analysis, the case turns on the effectiveness of local service delivery and whether or not powerful local interest groups are able to garner a significant proportion of funds allocated to the localities.Bradman and Mothered (2005) discuss theoretical tradeoffs between centralized and decentralized delivery of infrastructure services. Under conditions of considerable inequality, poorer and vulnerable sections of society might be disadvantaged by community based development, as existing social and economic relations might be used by more influential groups to the disadvantage of the usual target groups (Plateau, 2004). Plateau also emphasizes the risks of the outright embezzlement of funds, in addition to wasteful or misdirected spending.These tendencies are likely to be reinforced when as described above the PFM infrastructure, especially information flows and independent audit, are weak.The evidence on community-based development is mixed, at best (see the survey by Mansur and Rae, 2004).An assessment of Social Investment Funds suggests that these have been less than successful in generation ownership” the local communities (Tender, 2000), it a mismatch between the preferences of the donors and recipients, a “fa c ade” of consultation between communities and donors through the PPA process (Francis and James, 2003).A strong conclusion by Plateau (2004) is that electorates may not be willing or able to discipline corrupt local leaders, specially if there is some trickle-down and improvement regardless of the magnitude of funds diverted. And competition among donors may make matters worse. Is proposals include a sequential disbursement of assistance, and on accurate information on the spending, together with an improved technology of fraud detection. Equally important are the effective mechanisms put inplace to prevent and punish misuse of public funds. Translate into the infrastructure of budgeting and public spending, concluding adequate and effective control and audit mechanisms.In order to meet the requirement of providing accurate and timely information to policy makers, the legislature and the broader public, there is increasing emphasis in organic budget laws around the world that the budget should comply with the principles of comprehensiveness, unity, and internal consistency. Without the associated budgeting, reporting and audit infrastructure, it is unlikely that the good governance aspects of decentralized operations would be realized.The principle of comprehensiveness requires that the budget cover all government institutions undertaking government operations, so that the budget presents a consolidated and complete view of these operations and is voted on, as a whole, by the body vested with national legislative authority. Unfortunately, in many cases, donors' demands to maintain donor funds in extra budgetary or off-budget accounts have undermined the transparency and financial discipline of government operations (Premhang,1996),and often generated parallel and uncoordinated budget systems.The principle of unity requires that the budget includes all revenues and expenditures of all government agencies undertaking government operations. This principle is important to ensure that the budget is an effective instrument to impose a constraint on total and government expenditure, and promote higher efficiency in the allocation of resources.The principle of internal consistency between different components of the budget requires, in particular, hat current expenditure needed for the maintenance and operation of past investments be fully reflected in the budget. Moreover, this principle implies that there should be no dual budget systems involving a split between current and capital (or development) spending.The principles above translate in different ways in terms of information requirements for appropriations, accounting, controls and reporting, depending on the budgeting framework in use-and we distinguish here between a continuum-based ontraditional budgeting frameworks to those on the basis of "performance or outcomes." These are discussed sequentially below.ernment AccountabilityGovernment accountability is an essential principle of democracy through which elected and unelected public officials are obligated to explain their decisions and actions to the legislature and the broader public to ensure an appropriate use of public resources.The framework for government accountability usually includes a combination of political and administrative mechanisms designed to hold public officials responsible for their Performance.Fixed terms of office and fair elections are key political mechanisms to hold policy makers accountable. It these mechanisms, he electorate could remove elected government officials if their performance is not in line with public expectations. Legal mechanisms of accountability for both elected and unelected officials include all legislation proscribing actions that public officials can and cannot take and well as sanctions against officials with unsatisfactory conduct. Precondition legal accountability is an independent judicial system.Administrative accountability mechanisms entail independent auditors and ombudsmen, on sure that public officials do not transgress mandates or misuse public monies.A community-based scheme for government accountability combining political, and administrative mechanisms has received increasing attention by international agencies.Particularly important under this scheme are the legal instruments that require input from the communities on certain government decisions or provide access to the press or the broader public to information on government activities.B. Traditional Budgeting ModelsThe traditional cycle of budget appropriations, counting, control and reporting are described for both unitary and federal states. he recent experiences of developing countries in meeting the expenditure accountability requirements of the Heavily Indebted Poor Country (HIPC) initiative are summarized in sky and Floyd (2004).The typical stages of budgeting include decisions by the administration and authorized by the elative legislature on what to spend—this is the appropriation stage. This would increasingly place in a medium-term framework to fully capture the effects of decisions that last for multiple periods.In a unitary state with subnational governments, the budget decisions would be made by the central government and approved by the national legislature.Such an arrangement would be perfectly compatible with local communities reflecting their priorities to the agents of the center for incorporation in the national list of appropriations, s well as involvement with actual implementation.In a federal system, he center would appropriate transfers for each level, which in turn would prepare their own budgets. There would then be a premium on ensuring that promised transfers-it special purpose or general, “equalization”transfers—are made in a timely manner.Under either system, a fundamental rule for preventing rent seeking and ensuring accountability, throughout the entire budget process, is that there should be no spending without adequate appropriations and financing arrangements. In countries with the old Francophone PFM systems, funding could be provided to public entities without appropriations during the budget execution process, and “legalized” as an ex post appropriation in the budget of the subsequent year. This practice clearly weakens the possibilities of ensuring government accountability.A typology of classification of borrowing controls described by Ter-Minassian (1997), refers to four broad "stylized" categories: (1) market discipline; (2) rules-based controls; (3) administrative controls; and (4) cooperation between different levels of Government.Market disciplineSome countries rely exclusively on capital markets to restrain subnational borrowing. In this case, the central government would not set any limits on subnational borrowing and local governments are free to decide amounts, sources and uses of borrowing. Provinces in Canada as well as U. S. states have the right to borrow with no central review or control. Similarly, in Argentina, all levels ofgovernment are permitted to borrow both domestically and abroad.Markets have been myopic, as in the case of Argentina, and in many parts of the world, inadequate capital markets at the local level are inadequately developed to conceive of extensive reliance on market-based borrowing, or the ability of markets to discipline subnational government. Moreover, it is increasingly becoming clear that the ratings agencies, where they operate at the subnational level, evaluate all the public financial management criteria described above, as well as the overall design of intergovernmental system.Subnational governments may however decide on their own to adopt a fiscal rule in an attempt to enhance their credit standing in the market. Such self-imposed rules are found for example in Canada, Switzerland, and the United States. In these countries, sensational governments have generally direct access to financial markets to meet their borrowing requirements, and there are few precedents of bailouts of insolvent subnational governments by the central government; hence their desire to maintain a favorable credit rating in the markets. More recently, Argentina sought to follow this approach with the introduction of a Fiscal Responsibility Law and the establishment of a Federal Council for Fiscal Responsibility.Rules-based approachIn some cases, his central government might try to contain subnational borrowing by imposing a fiscal rule. Both federal and unitary states have relied on various standing rules specified in the constitution or in laws to control subnational borrowing, in an effort to confer credibility for the conduct of macroeconomic policies. Such rules introduce a constraint on fiscal policy to guarantee that fundamentals will remain predictable and robust regardless of the government in charge.Enforcing borrowing controlsThree basic mechanisms are used by countries to enforce borrowing controls at the subnational level: (1) market discipline (2) intergovernmental entities operating with in a cooperative arrangement (3) administrative procedures carried out by an entity of the public sector.This paper focuses on the institutional and procedural backbone of decentralizedgovernance. It illustrates that decentralization relying solely on community safeguards will generally be insufficient to ensure pro-poor spending, and that there needs to be concomitant emphasis on the generation of accurate and timely information on the actual spending, if not on the outcomes. This needs to be supplemented by effective mechanisms to detect, prevent, and punish misuse of resources or diversion of funds.Even with adequate monitoring of subnational spending, there has to be an emphasis on the effects of such spending, particularly the incurring of debt and other contingent liabilities, on overall macroeconomic aggregates. Again, the implementation of orderly macroeconomic adjustments will rely on the nature of the public financial management infrastructure at all levels of government.Source: Ehtisham Ahmad, Maria Albino-War, and Raju Singh. Subnational Public Financial Management: Institutions and Macroeconomic Considerations. IMF Working paper,2005(108),pp.1-26.二、翻译文章译文:国家公共财务管理:机构和宏观经济的思考中央政府在透明的公共财政管理过程中,需要地方一级机构的配合,这反映了其职能的需要,同时为了能和地方政府创造更好的下放管理效率,确保良好的问责制和竞争机制是关键因素。
新公共管理外文翻译文献(文档含中英文对照即英文原文和中文翻译)原文:New Public Management and the Quality ofGovernment:Coping with the New Political Governance in CanadaPeter AucoinDalhousie UniversityHalifax, CanadaConference on ‘New Public Management and the Quality of Government’,SOG and the Quality of Government Institute,University of GothenburgSwedenA tension between New Public Management (NPM) and good governance,including good public administration, has long been assumed by those who regard the structures and practices advocated and brought about by NPM as departing from the principles and norms of good governance that underpinned traditional public administration (Savoie 1994). The concern has not abated (Savoie 2008).As this dynamic has played out over the past three decades, however, there emerged an even more significant challenge not only to the traditional structures, practices and values of the professional, non-partisan public service but also to those reforms introduced by NPM that have gained wide, if not universal, acceptance as positive development in public administration. This challenge is what I call New Political Governance (NPG). It is NPG, and not NPM, I argue, that constitutes the principal threat to good governance, including good public administration, and thus the Quality of Government (QoG) as defined by Rothstein and Teorell (2008). It is a threat to the extent that partisans in government, sometimes overtly, mostly covertly, seek to use and override the public service – an impartial institution of government –to better secure their partisan advantage (Campbell 2007; MacDermott 2008 a, 2008b). In so doing, these governors engage in a politicization of the public service and its administration of public business that constitutes a form of political corruption that cannot but undermine good governance. NPM is not a cause of this politicization, I argue, but it is an intervening factor insofar as NPM reforms, among other reforms of the last three decades, have had the effect of publicly exposing the public service in ways that have made it more vulnerable to political pressures on the part of the political executive.I examine this phenomenon by looking primarily at the case of Canada, but with a number of comparative Westminster references. I consider the phenomenon to be an international one, affecting most, if not all, Western democracies. The pressures outlined below are virtually the same everywhere. The responses vary somewhat because of political leadership and the institutional differences between systems, even in the Westminster systems. The phenomenon must also be viewed in the context of time, given both the emergence of the pressures that led to NPM in the first instance, as a new management-focused approach to public administration, and the emergence of the different pressures that now contribute to NPG, as a politicized approach togovernance with important implications for public administration, and especially for impartiality, performance and accountability.New Public Management in the Canadian ContextSince the early 1980s, NPM has taken several different forms in various jurisdictions. Adopting private-sector management practices was seen by some as a part,even if a minor part, of the broader neo-conservative/neo-liberal political economy movement that demanded wholesale privatization of government enterprises and public services, extensive deregulation of private enterprises, and significant reductions in public spending –‘rolling back the state’, as it was put a at the outse t (Hood 1991). By some accounts, almost everything that changed over the past quarter of a century is attributed to NPM. In virtually every jurisdiction, nonetheless, NPM, as public management reform, was at least originally about achieving greater economy and efficiency in the management of public resources in government operations and in the delivery of public services (Pollitt 1990). The focus, in short, was on ‘management’.Achieving greater economy in the use of public resources was at the forefront of concerns, given the fiscal and budgetary situations facing all governments in the 1970s,and managerial efficiency was not far behind, given assumptions about the impoverished quality of management in public services everywhere.By the turn of the century, moreover, NPM, as improved public management in this limited sense, was well embedded in almost all governments, at least as the norm (although it was not always or everywhere referred to as NPM). This meant increased managerial authority, discretion and flexibility:•for managing public resources (financial and human);•for managing public-service delivery systems; and,•for collaborating with other public-sector agencies as well as with privatesector agencies in tackling horizontal – multi-organizational and/or multisectoral– issues.This increased managerial authority, flexibility and discretion was, in some jurisdictions, notably the Britain and New Zealand, coupled with increased organizational differentiation, as evidenced by a proliferation of departments andagencies with narrowed mandates, many with a single purpose. “Agencification’, however, was not a major focus reform in all jurisdictions, including Canada and Australia where such change, if not on the margins, was clearly secondary to enhanced managerial authority and responsibility (Pollitt and Talbot 2004).The major NPM innovations quickly led to concerns, especially in those jurisdictions where these developments were most advanced, about a loss of public service coherence and corporate capacity, on the one hand, and a diminished sense of and commitment to public-service ethos, ethics and values, on the other. Reactions to these concerns produced some retreat, reversals, and re-balancing of the systems in questions (Halligan 2006). Nowhere, however, was there a wholesale rejection of NPM, in theory or practice, and a return to traditional public administration, even if there necessarily emerged some tension between rhetoric and action (Gregory 2006). The improvements in public management brought about by at least some aspects of NPM were simply too obvious, even if these improvements were modest in comparison to the original claims of NPM proponents.At the same time that NPM became a major force for change in public administration, however, it was accompanied by a companion force that saw political executives seeking to assert greater political control over the administration and apparatus of the state, not only in the formulation of public policies but also in the administration of public services. Accordingly, from the start, at least in the Anglo-American systems, there was a fundamental paradox as political executives, on both the left and the right sides of the partisan-political divide, sought to (re)assert dominance over their public-service bureaucracies while simultaneously devolving greater management authority to them (Aucoin 1990).The impetus for this dynamic lay in the dissatisfaction of many political executives with the ‘responsiveness’ of public servants to the politi cal authority and policy agendas of these elected officials. Public choice and principal-agency theories provided the ideological justifications for taking action against what were perceived as self-serving bureaucrats (Boston 1996). Beyond theory and ideology, however, the practice of public administration by professional public servants in some jurisdictions, notably Australia, Britain and New Zealand, offered more than sufficient evidence topolitical leaders of a public-service culture that gave only grudging acceptance, at best, to the capacity of elected politicians to determine what constituted the ‘public interest’ in public policy and administration.The Canadian case is of interest, I suggest, for several reasons. In comparative perspective, Canada did not approach public management reform with much of an ideological perspective. When the Conservatives defeated the centrist Liberals in 1984, neither the new prime minister, Brian Mulroney, nor his leading ministers were hardcore neo-conservatives in the Ronald Reagan or Margaret Thatcher mold. At that time, and until the end of the Conservative government in 1993, the party was essentially a centrist party in the Canadian ‘brokerage’ party tradition. While important aspects of neoliberalism unfolded, especially under the umbrella of economic deregulation that came with a free-trade agreement with the United States, there were no major administrative reforms that were politically driven. Pragmatism prevailed (Gow 2004). As a result, the reforms initiated during this period were essentially undertakings of the professional public-service leadership that sought to stay abreast with developments elsewhere. The scope and depth of these reforms were affected, however, by the extent to which ministers wanted to maintain an active involvement in administration (Aucoin 1995).By comparison to developments elsewhere, Canadian ministers were less inclined to worry about the professional public service being unresponsive to their political direction. Nonetheless, the Mulroney regime saw an expansion in the number, roles and influence of ‘political staff’ appointed to ministers’ offices, most notably in the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO). These staff, who have grown continuously in number over the past four decades, are not public servants, although they are employed on the public payroll. Unlike public servants, who are appointed independently of ministers, political staff are appointed and dismissed at the discretion of ministers and, of course, they have no tenure beyond their ministers. And, in official constitutional doctrine, they have no separate authority to direct the public service. In the Canadian tradition, moreover, they are appointed almost exclusively from partisan-political circles and appointees rarely possess any public service experience.For all these reasons, the Canadian government did not go as far down the NPMroad as its three major Westminster counterparts (Australia, Britain and New Zealand) in terms of such matters as ‘agencification,’ devolution, term contracts for executives, external recruitment, or contracting-out. And, the reforms that did occur did not fundamentally transform the traditional administrative architecture. Throughout, there was retained, and even further developed:•an integrated public service, with the most senior levels drawn from the career public service and managed and deployed as a corporate executive resource; •departmental organizations, structured hierarchically with the minister as political executive and combining public policy and operational/service delivery responsibilities; and,•public administrative structures for addressing both corporate or governmentwide concerns and horizontal policy and service delivery issues.These features were seen as strengths of the Canadian approach (Bourgon 1998; Lindquist 2006; Dunn 2002).At the same time, reforms were initiated to improve public management that followed the principal NPM script: some measure of devolution of management authority from central management agencies to the senior public-service executives of line departments for (a) achieving greater economy and efficiency in the use of public resources, (b) improving service delivery, and (c) enhancing collaboration across departments to address those wicked ‘horizontal’ problems that defy government’s organizational boundaries (Bakvis and Juillet 2004).Further, in addressing one major challenge that was critical in the first years of NPM, namely, the fiscal crisis of the state in the latter part of the 20th century, the record of Canada was at first dismal and then dramatically successful. While the Conservative government, in power from 1984-93, was unable to wrestle annual deficits to the ground, a major program-budget review initiated following the Liberal Party victory in 1993 resulted, in surprisingly short order, in annual multi-billion dollar budget surpluses for over a decade – the best record in the G-8 nations (a group that does not include Australia which has had a similar experience with very large budget surpluses). On this front, political will and discipline, but not ideology, was a decisive force.By the first decade of the 21st century, moreover, Canada also came to be ranked first both in E-Government and in Service Delivery on one major international scorecard. On this front, the fact that the public service has been able to operate essentially on its own has helped spur progress. The Canadian emphasis on citizen-centred service drew inspiration from the NPM foc us on ‘customers’ but, at the same time, paid serious attention to the priorities of citizens as defined by citizens –the outside-in perspective that enabled a significant advance in integrated service delivery structures and processes using multiple channels of service (Flumian, Coe and Kernaghan 2007). The Canadian methodology for this performance-based approach to service-delivery measurement and improvement is being adopted elsewhere in the Westminster systems.Finally, and clearly on a much less positive note, a good deal of attention has been required in Canada over the past decade to codes of ethics, public service values, transparency, comptrollership, and public accountability –thanks in large part to a series of alleged and real political-administrative scandals! Not surprisingly, this is where NPG and its effects on the quality of government can be witnessed in spades.译文:新公共化管理与政府质量:符合加拿大的新的政治治理彼得奥克达尔豪西大学哈利法克斯,加拿大在会议上发表“新公共管理与政府质量”SOG和政府机构的质量,哥德堡大学瑞典新公共管理(NPM)和良好的管理之间的张力,包括长期以来一直承担那些倡导结构和做法和把带来关于新公共管理作为善政的原则和传统的公共规范作为基础的良好的公共行政(萨瓦1994年)。
公共管理中英文对照外文翻译文献(文档含英文原文和中文翻译)中英文资料外文翻译The New Public Management SituationNo doubt, many countries in the world, and both developed countries and developing countries, in the late 1980s and early 1990s began a continuous public sector management reform movement. The reform movement is still in many aspects government continue to the organization and management of the influence. People in these reforms view repudiating them. Critics especially in Britain and the United States, critics say the new mode of various problems exist, but also does not have the international prevailing reform of public management, could not be called paradigm. Criticism from almost every aspect of the change. Most of the academic criticismbelong to the mouth. Different schools of thought in detail discussion, The academic journal articles and abstraction, from reality. At the same time, in the practice of public management and implementation of the reform and the change. As I in other articles in the thought, in most countries, the traditional public administrative mode for public management mode has been replaced. The reform of public department responded to the realities of several interrelated problems, including: the function of public sector provide public services of low efficiency, Economic theory of change, Private sector related changes impact of globalization, especially as a kind of economic power, Technology changes made decentralization and better control globally becomes possible. The administrative management can be divided into three stages: the development of distinct phases,and public administration before traditional pattern and public management reform stage. Each stage has its own management mode. From a stage of transition to the next stage is not easy, from the traditional public administration to public administration has not yet completed the transition. But it was only a matter of time. Because the new mode of theoretical basis is very strong. The new public management movement ", "although this name, but it is not only a debate in the booming, and in most developed countries have taken the best management mode of expression. The traditional administrative mode than it's age is a great reform, but that time has passed.A traditional patternObviously, in the late 19th century bureaucracy system theory, not sound already exists some form of administrative management. Public administration has a long history, and it is the concept of a government and the rise of civilization as history. As the case Glad2den Osama bin laden (point), a model of administrative since the government appears has existed. First is endowed with founder or leader, then is the social or administrative person to organizers of eternity. Administration management or business is all in social activities, although not among factors, but the glow of social sustainable development is of vital importance. Recognized administrative system in ancient Egypt is already exists, its jurisdiction from the Nile flooding caused by the year to build the pyramids irrigation affairs. China is adopted in the han dynasty, Confucian norms that government should be elected, not according to the background, but according to the character and ability, the government's main goal is to seek the welfare of the people. In Europe, various empire - Greek, Roman, and the holy Roman, Spain'sadministrative empire, they first by the central through various rules and procedures. Weber's thought, "modern" medieval countries develop simultaneously with "bureaucratic management structure development". Although these countries in different ways, but they have common features, it can be called before modern. Namely, the administrative system of early essence is the personification of, or the establishment in Max Weber's "nepotism" basis, i.e. to loyal to the king or minister certain human foundation, not is personified, With allegiance to the organization or individual basis rather than for the foundation. Although there are such a viewpoint that administration itself not only praise from traditional mode, the characteristic of early but often leads to seek personal interests corruption or abuse of power. In the early administrative system, we now feel very strange approach has the functions of government administration is generally behavior. All those who walk official tend to rely on friends or relatives for work or buy officer, which means the money to buy the first officer or tax officials, and then out to the customer to money, which is the first to buy officer recovery investment cost, and can make a fortune. America in the 19th century FenFei system of "political parties" means in the ruling changed at the same time, the government of all administrative position is changed. Modern bureaucracy is before "personal, traditional, diffusion and similar and special", and according to the argument, modern Weber bureaucracy is "impersonal, rational, concrete, achievement orientation and common". Personalized government is often inefficient: nepotism means incompetent not capable person was arranged to positions of leadership, FenFei political corruption, in addition to making often still exist serious low efficiency. The enormoussuccess of traditional administrative pattern that early practice looks strange. Specialization and not politicized administrative in our opinion is so difficult to imagine that trace, there exist other system. Western administrative system even simple selection of officials to pass theexam, until 1854, Britain and north G..M. Trevelyan report after Northcote - began to establish in China, although the system has long passage.The traditional public administrative patternIn the late 19th century, additionally one kind of pattern on the world popular, this is the so-called traditional administrative pattern. Its main theoretical basis from several countries, namely, the American scholars and Germany Woodrow Wilson of Max Weber's, people put their associated with bureaucracy model, Frederick Tyler systematically elaborated the scientific management theory, the theory of the private sector from America, for public administration method was provided. And the other theorists, Taylor without focusing on public sector, but his theory was influential in this field. The three traditional public administration mode is theorist of main effect. In other countries, plus G..M. Trevelyan and North America, the state administration of administrative system, especially the Wilson has produced important influence. In the 19th century, the north G..M. Trevelyan and put forward through the examination and character, and appointed officials put forward bias and administrative neutral point of view. The traditional administrative pattern has the following features:1. The bureaucracy. The government shall, according to the principle of bureaucratic rank and organization. The German sociologist Max Weber bureaucracy system of a classic, andanalysis. Although the bureaucracy in business organizations and other tissues, but it is in the public sector got better and longer.2. The best way of working and procedures are in full manual detail codes, for administrative personnel to follow. Strictly abide by these principles will run for the organization provides the best way.3. Bureaucratic service. Once the government policy areas in, it will be through the bureaucracy to provide public products and service providers.4. In political and administrative two relations, political and administrative managers generally think of administrative affairs can be separated. Administration is the implement instruction, and any matter policy or strategic affairs shall be decided by the political leaders, which can ensure that the democratic system.5. Public interests are assumed to individual civil servants, the only motive for public service is selfless paying.6. Professional bureaucracy. Public administration is viewed as a kind of special activities, thus requirements, obscure, civil servants neutral equal employment and lifelong service to any political leaders.7. The administrative task is to carry out the meaning of the written instructions and not others assume the personal responsibility.Through the comparison of the early administrative pattern, we can better understand the main advantages and Webber system differences. Webber system and it is the most important mode of various before the difference: the rule-based impersonal system replaced the personification of administrative management system. An organization and its rules than any of the people are important organization. Bureaucracy is itsoperation and how to respond to customer must is personified. As Weber has demonstrated that the modern office management ", will be incorporated into various regulations deeply touched it. The modern public administration by law theory, to command certain affairs authority has been awarded the legitimate public authority. This does not grant an institution specific cases through some instructions. It only matters is abstractly control some issues. In contrast, through personal privileges and give concession regulation of all affairs. The latter is completely dominated by the hereditary system, at least these affairs is not the traditional infringement is this situation."It is very important. Early administration based on personal relationships, be loyal to relatives, protect, leaders or political, rather than on the system. Sometimes, the early administration is politically sensitive, because of the administrative organs of the staff is appointed, they also politicians arms or mainstream class. However, it is often autocratic, autocratic administration may be unfair, especially for those who can't or unwilling to input personal and political game. One of the basic principles for with weber impersonal system to completely eliminate autocratic - at least in ideal condition is so. File exists, the reference principle of parallel and legal basis in the same environment means will always make the same decision. Below this kind ofcircumstance is not only more efficient, and the citizen and bureaucratic hierarchy know myself.Other differences were associated with this. In various regulations and impersonal basis, will naturally formed strict hierarchy. Personal rating system and its provisions in the left unchanged. Although Webber emphasizes the entire system, but he also noticed the bureaucracy of the organization andindividual term.The traditional administrative mode won great success, it is widely adopted by governments around the world. Theoretically or in practice, it shows the advantage. And before the corruption flourished, it is more efficient than system, and the thought of individual professionalization civil servants and amateur service has a great progress. However, this model is also exposed the problems that shows that the model can even said outdated, also can say is outdated.The theory of public administration has been difficult to describe the pillar. Political control theory has problems. Administrative means follow instructions, so people demand a well-ordered transceiver method. Instruction between implementers and has a clear division. But this is not the reality, and with the public service domain expands the scale and more impossible. The traditional mode of another theoretical pillar - bureaucracy theory is no longer considered particularly effective form of organization. Formal bureaucracy could have its advantages, but people think it often training to routineer and innovators, Encourage executives rather than risk aversion risk-taking, encourage them to waste instead of effective use of scarce resources. Webb was the bureaucracy is regarded as an ideal type ", "but now this ideal type is inert, cultivate the progressive, leads to low efficiency, these mediocrity and is believed to be the public sector of the special disease. It is also criticized. Actually, the word "bureaucracy in today's more likely as low efficiency of synonyms.The new public management modeIn the 1980s, the public sector is a traditional administrative pattern of new management methods of defects. This methodcan alleviate some of the problems of traditional pattern, also means that the public sector operation aspects has changed significantly. The new management method has many names: management of "individualism", "the new public administration", based on the market of public administration ", after the bureaucracy model "or" entrepreneurial government ". To the late 1990s, people tend to use "and the concept of new public administration". Although the new public management, but for many of the names of public management of department of actual changes happened, people still have a consensus. First, no matter what, it is called mode with traditional represents a significant change of public administration, different more attention and managers of the individual responsibility. Second, it is clear to get rid of the classical bureaucracy, thereby organization, personnel, term and conditions more flexible. Third, it stipulates the organization and personnel, and it can target according to the performance indicators measuring task completion. Also, to plan the assessment system for more than ever before, and also can be more strictly determine whether the government plans to achieve its objectives. Fourth, the senior executives are more likely to color with political government work, rather than independent or neutral. Fifth, the more likely the inspection by the market, buyers of public service provider and distinguish "helmsman, with the rower to distinguish". Government intervention is not always refers to the government by means of bureaucracy. Sixth, appeared through privatization and market means such as inspection, contract of government function reduce trend. In some cases, it is fundamental. Once happened during the transformation from the important changes to all connected with this, the continuity of the steps arenecessary.Holmes and Shand as a useful characteristics of generalization. They put the new public management paradigm, the good as management method has the following features: (1) it is a more strategic or structure of decision-making method (around the efficiency, quality and service). (2) decentralization type management environment replaced concentration level structure. The resource allocation and service delivery closer to supply, we can get more itself from the customers and related information and other interest groups. (3) can be more flexible to replace the method of public products supply directly, so as to provide cost savings of the policy. (4) concernedwith the responsibility, authority as the key link of improving performance, including emphasize clear performance contract mechanism. (5) in the public sector, and between internal to create a competitive environment. (6) strengthen the strategic decision-making ability, which can quickly, flexible and low cost to manage multiple interests outside change and the response.(7) by request relevant results and comprehensive cost reports to improve transparency and responsibility. (8) general service budget and management system to support and encourage the change.The new public management and realize a result that no one in the best way. Managers in endowed with responsibility and without being told to get results. Decision is a management job duties, if not for achieving goals, managers should assume responsibility.ConclusionThe government management over the past 150 years experienced three modes. First is the personification of modernadministrative mode, or when the pattern of its defects and increasingly exposed to improve efficiency, it is the second mode of traditional bureaucracy model is replaced. Similarly, when the traditional administrative mode problems, it is the third model is the new public management, from the government to alternative market. Since 1980s, the dominance of the market as the 1920s to 1960s dominant bureaucracy. In any kind of government, market and bureaucratic system are coexisting, just a form at some stage dominant, and in another stage of another kind of form, the dominant. The new public management is increasingly weakened and bureaucracy in the public administration field market dominant period.In reality, the market and bureaucracy, mutual complement each other. The new public management may not be completely replace the bureaucracy, as in 1989, the eastern Europe before bureaucracy could not instead of the market. But the new public management movement is early traditional bureaucracy, many functions can be and often by market now. In a bureaucracy system for organizational principle is weakened environment, market solutions will be launched. Of course not all market prescription can succeed, but this is not the issue. The government of new public management will be a toolbox dowsed solutions. If the scheme of the ineffective, the government will from the same source for other solutions. The theory behind the government management has already happened, we can use the term "paradigm" to describe it. In public administration academia, many of the new public management denial of critics. But their criticism of the government reform quickly. In the new public management mode, another a kind of new mode, but certainly not returned tothe traditional administrative pattern.新公共管理的现状毫无疑问,世界上许多国家,无论是发达国家还是发展中国家,在20世纪80年代后期和90年代初期都开始了一场持续的公共部门管理变革运动。
企业资金管理中英文对照外文翻译文献(文档含英文原文和中文翻译)An Analysis of Working Capital Management Results Across IndustriesAbstractFirms are able to reduce financing costs and/or increase the fund s available for expansion by minimizing the amount of funds tied upin current assets. We provide insights into the performance of surv eyed firms across key components of working capital management by usi ng the CFO magazine’s annual Working CapitalManagement Survey. We discover that significant differences exist b etween industries in working capital measures across time.In addition.w e discover that these measures for working capital change significantl y within industries across time.IntroductionThe importance of efficient working capital management is indisputa ble. Working capital is the difference between resources in cash or readily convertible into cash (Current Assets) and organizational commi tments for which cash will soon be required (Current Liabilities). Th e objective of working capital management is to maintain the optimum balance of each of the working capital components. Business viabilit y relies on the ability to effectively manage receivables. inventory.a nd payables. Firms are able to reduce financing costs and/or increase the funds available for expansion by minimizing the amount of funds tied up in current assets. Much managerial effort is expended in b ringing non-optimal levels of current assets and liabilities back towa rd optimal levels. An optimal level would be one in which a balance is achieved between risk and efficiency.A recent example of business attempting to maximize working capita l management is the recurrent attention being given to the applicatio n of Six Sigma®methodology. Six S igma®methodologies help companies measure and ensure quality in all areas of the enterprise. When used to identify and rectify discrepancies.inefficiencies and erroneous tra nsactions in the financial supply chain. Six Sigma®reduces Days Sale s Outstanding (DSO).accelerates the payment cycle.improves customer sati sfaction and reduces the necessary amount and cost of working capital needs. There appear to be many success stories including Jennifertwon’s(2002) report of a 15percent decrease in days that sales are outstanding.resulting in an increased cash flow of approximately $2 million at Thibodaux Regional Medical Cenrer.Furthermore bad debts declined from 3.4millin to $6000000.However.Waxer’s(2003)study of multiple firms employing Six Sig ma®finds that it is really a “get rich slow”technique with a r ate of return hovering in the 1.2 – 4.5 percent range.Even in a business using Six Sigma®methodology. an “optimal”level of working capital management needs to be identified. Industry factors may impa ct firm credit policy.inventory management.and bill-paying activities. S ome firms may be better suited to minimize receivables and inventory. while others maximize payables. Another aspect of “optimal”is the extent to which poor financial results can be tied to sub-optimal pe rformance.Fortunately.these issues are testable with data published by CFO magazine. which claims to be the source of “tools and informati on for the financial executive.”and are the subject of this resear ch.In addition to providing mean and variance values for the working capital measures and the overall metric.two issues will be addressed in this research. One research question is. “are firms within a p articular industry clustered together at consistent levels of working capital measures?For instance.are firms in one industry able to quickl y transfer sales into cash.while firms from another industry tend to have high sales levels for the particular level of inventory . The other research question is. “does working capital management perform ance for firms within a given industry change from year-to-year?”The following section presents a brief literature review.Next.the r esearch method is described.including some information about the annual Working Capital Management Survey published by CFO magazine. Findings are then presented and conclusions are drawn.Related LiteratureThe importance of working capital management is not new to the f inance literature. Over twenty years ago. Largay and Stickney (1980) reported that the then-recent bankruptcy of W.T. Grant. a nationwide chain of department stores.should have been anticipated because the co rporation had been running a deficit cash flow from operations for e ight of the last ten years of its corporate life.As part of a stud y of the Fortune 500s financial management practices. Gilbert and Rei chert (1995) find that accounts receivable management models are used in 59 percent of these firms to improve working capital projects.wh ile inventory management models were used in 60 percent of the compa nies.More recently. Farragher. Kleiman and Sahu (1999) find that 55 p ercent of firms in the S&P Industrial index complete some form of a cash flow assessment. but did not present insights regarding account s receivable and inventory management. or the variations of any curre nt asset accounts or liability accounts across industries.Thus.mixed ev idence exists concerning the use of working capital management techniq ues.Theoretical determination of optimal trade credit limits are the s ubject of many articles over the years (e.g. Schwartz 1974; Scherr 1 996).with scant attention paid to actual accounts receivable management.Across a limited sample. Weinraub and Visscher (1998) observe a tend ency of firms with low levels of current ratios to also have low l evels of current liabilities. Simultaneously investigating accounts rece ivable and payable issues.Hill. Sartoris.and Ferguson (1984) find diffe rences in the way payment dates are defined. Payees define the date of payment as the date payment is received.while payors view paymen t as the postmark date.Additional WCM insight across firms.industries.a nd time can add to this body of research.Maness and Zietlow (2002. 51. 496) presents two models of value creation that incorporate effective short-term financial management acti vities.However.these models are generic models and do not consider uni que firm or industry influences. Maness and Zietlow discuss industry influences in a short paragraph that includes the observation that. “An industry a company is located in may have more influence on th at company’s fortunes than overall GNP”(2002. 507).In fact. a car eful review of this 627-page textbook finds only sporadic information on actual firm levels of WCM dimensions.virtually nothing on industr y factors except for some boxed items with titles such as. “Should a Retailer Offer an In-House Credit Card”(128) and nothing on WC M stability over time. This research will attempt to fill this void by investigating patterns related to working capital measures within industries and illustrate differences between industries across time.An extensive survey of library and Internet resources provided ver y few recent reports about working capital management. The most relev ant set of articles was Weisel and Bradley’s (2003) article on cash flow management and one of inventory control as a result of effect ive supply chain management by Hadley (2004).Research Method The CFO RankingsThe first annual CFO Working Capital Survey. a joint project with REL Consultancy Group.was published in the June 1997 issue of CFO (Mintz and Lezere 1997). REL is a London. England-based management co nsulting firm specializing in working capital issues for its global l ist of clients. The original survey reports several working capital b enchmarks for public companies using data for 1996. Each company is ranked against its peers and also against the entire field of 1.000 companies. REL continues to update the original information on an a nnual basis.REL uses the “cash flow from operations”value located on firm cash flow statements to estimate cash conversion efficiency (CCE). T his value indicates how well a company transforms revenues into cash flow. A “days of working capital”(DWC) value is based on the d ollar amount in each of the aggregate.equally-weighted receivables.inven tory.and payables accounts. The “days of working capital”(DNC) repr esents the time period between purchase of inventory on acccount fromvendor until the sale to the customer.the collection of the receiva bles. and payment receipt.Thus.it reflects the companys ability to fin ance its core operations with vendor credit. A detailed investigation of WCM is possible because CFO also provides firm and industry val ues for days sales outstanding (A/R).inventory turnover.and days payabl es outstanding (A/P).Research FindingsAverage and Annual Working Capital Management Performance Working capital management component definitions and average values for the entire 1996 –2000 period .Across the nearly 1.000 firms in the survey.cash flow from operations. defined as cash flow from operations divided by sales and referred to as “cash conversion ef ficiency”(CCE).averages 9.0 percent.Incorporating a 95 percent confide nce interval. CCE ranges from 5.6 percent to 12.4 percent. The days working capital (DWC). defined as the sum of receivables and invent ories less payables divided by daily sales.averages 51.8 days and is very similar to the days that sales are outstanding (50.6).because the inventory turnover rate (once every 32.0 days) is similar to the number of days that payables are outstanding (32.4 days).In all ins tances.the standard deviation is relatively small.suggesting that these working capital management variables are consistent across CFO report s.Industry Rankings on Overall Working Capital Management Perfo rmanceCFO magazine provides an overall working capital ranking for firms in its ing the following equation:Industry-based differences in overall working capital management are presented for the twenty-s ix industries that had at least eight companies included in the rank ings each year.In the typical year. CFO magazine ranks 970 companies during this period. Industries are listed in order of the mean ove rall CFO ranking of working capital performance. Since the best avera ge ranking possible for an eight-company industry is 4.5 (this assume s that the eight companies are ranked one through eight for the ent ire survey). it is quite obvious that all firms in the petroleum in dustry must have been receiving very high overall working capital man agement rankings.In fact.the petroleum industry is ranked first in CCE and third in DWC (as illustrated in Table 5 and discussed later i n this paper).Furthermore.the petroleum industry had the lowest standar d deviation of working capital rankings and range of working capital rankings. The only other industry with a mean overall ranking less than 100 was the Electric & Gas Utility industry.which ranked secon d in CCE and fourth in DWC. The two industries with the worst work ing capital rankings were Textiles and Apparel. Textiles rank twenty-s econd in CCE and twenty-sixth in DWC. The apparel industry ranks twenty-third and twenty-fourth in the two working capital measures ConclusionsThe research presented here is based on the annual ratings of wo rking capital management published in CFO magazine. Our findings indic ate a consistency in how industries “stack up”against each other over time with respect to the working capital measures.However.the wor king capital measures themselves are not static (i.e.. averages of wo rking capital measures across all firms change annually); our results indicate significant movements across our entire sample over time. O ur findings are important because they provide insight to working cap ital performance across time. and on working capital management across industries. These changes may be in explained in part by macroecono mic factors Changes in interest rates.rate of innovation.and competitio n are likely to impact working capital management. As interest rates rise.there would be less desire to make payments early.which would stretch accounts payable.accounts receivable.and cash accounts. The ra mifications of this study include the finding of distinct levels of WCM measures for different industries.which tend to be stable over ti me. Many factors help to explain this discovery. The improving econom y during the period of the study may have resulted in improved turn over in some industries.while slowing turnover may have been a signal of troubles ahead. Our results should be interpreted cautiously. Our study takes places over a short time frame during a generally impr oving market. In addition. the survey suffers from survivorship bias –only the top firms within each industry are ranked each year and the composition of those firms within the industry can change annua lly.Further research may take one of two lines.First.there could bea study of whether stock prices respond to CFO magazine’s publication of working capital management rating.Second,there could be a study of which if any of the working capital management components relate to share price performance.Given our results,there studies need to take industry membership into consideration when estimating stock price reaction to working capital management performance.对整个行业中营运资金管理的研究格雷格Filbeck.Schweser学习计划托马斯M克鲁格.威斯康星大学拉克罗斯摘要:企业能够降低融资成本或者尽量减少绑定在流动资产上的成立基金数额来用于扩大现有的资金。
中英文资料翻译A Financial Control System that Focuses on Improvement and SuccessOf course, we are not saying that businesses should ignore prudent controls over their cash drawer. The point is that focusing on small components while not knowing how much cash is tied up in receivables does not represent a control system that recognizes priorities and risk. Focusing solely on the rote and mundane does little to improve your overall financial performance. Financial control systems shouldn’t just be about compliance, they should be about continually improving key aspects of the financial operation such as:∙Regularly reviewing and improving the overall capital structure.∙Using a capital plan to minimize the cost of capital while strengthening the Debt/Equity position.∙Managing working capital so excessive inventories and receivables do not sap financial resources.∙Ensuring proper calculations and scenarios are explored while making debt/investment or leasing decisions.∙Maximizing returns while minimizing costs for cash and merchant accounts.A control system of well-defined processes is not only about control or compliance, it is also about consistently striving to do a little better. Control systems that are designed only to achieve compliance are doing the bare minimum, and they represent a missed opportunity to gain improvement and a competitive edge. And that should be enough reason for any size and type of company to think about using a continual improving process approach to creating a financial internal control system. Sox is nice; but continual improvement is better for everyone.Financial control of projectsPurpose:Established and effective cost control systems and procedures, understood and adopted by all members of the project team, entail less effort than ‘crisis management’ and will release management effort to other areas of the project.Fitness for purpose checklist:∙The prime objective of the government’s procurement policy is to achieve best VFM.∙To exercise financial/cost control, project sponsors need to review and act on the best and most appropriate cost information. This means that they should receive regular, consistent and accurate cost reports that are both comprehensive in detail and presented in a manner that permits easyunderstanding of both status and trends. Reports need to be tailored to suit the individual needs of each project and should always be presented to givea comparison of the present position with the control estimate.∙Reports to project sponsors normally give only the status of the project overall. But sponsors will on occasion need to monitor costs against a specific cost centre in more detail. The typical contents of a cost report are given in Annex A.∙Tables of figures are essential, but for rapid understanding and analysis of trends some graphs are helpful.Suggested content:The following aspects should be addressed in a financial report (rather than repeating detailed information available in earlier reports, later reports can summarise the key points and cross refer to the relevant earlier reports):∙development of budget∙original authorised budget∙new budget authorisations (giving justification for changes)∙current authorised budget∙expenditure to date(Each section on budgets and expenditure should address the original base estimates and risk allowances for each element)∙commitments∙agreed variations (giving justification for variations)∙potential/expected claims or disputes awaiting resolution (if the project is going well, this area should be small)∙commitments required to complete∙orders yet to be placed∙variations pending∙future changes anticipated.Each of the following cost elements should be covered:∙in-house costs and expenses (including all central support services, administration, overheads etc)∙consultancy fees and expenses (design, feasibility, client advice, legal, construction management, site supervision etc)∙land costs∙way leaves and compensation∙demolition and diversion of existing facilities∙new construction or refurbishment costs∙operating costs∙maintenance costs∙disposal costs∙insurance costs∙all other costs relating to the project not listed above.∙All prices need to be discounted to a common base.∙Example of a cost summary reportFinancial ControlFinancial Control is a major contributory factor to business survival. For many managers, exercising effective financial control is, at best, seen as a mystery and, at worst, not even considered. Yet monitoring a small number of important figures can ensure that you retain complete and effective financial control.ObjectivesThis section is intended to help you put in place that financial control: to ensure that you are estimating costs accurately and then keeping them under control; to ensure that you are charging and/or paying the right price; and to ensure that you can collect money owed to you and can pay your bills as they fall due. Its objectives are:∙to demonstrate how effective financial control assists in the management of the organisation in which you work;∙to show that control can be achieved through simple documentation; and,∙to suggest financial indicators for inclusion in your strategic objectives.1 Achieving ControlGood financial results will not arise by happy accident! They will arise by realistic planning and tight control over expenses. Remember that profit is the comparatively small difference between two large numbers: sales and costs. A relatively small change in either costs or sales, therefore, has a disproportionate effect on profit.You must watch your costs/prices and margins very carefully at all times since small changes in any of these areas can lead to substantial changes in net profit. Control can then be exercised by comparing actual performance with budget. To do this, you will need to produce:∙ a financial plan, agreed as being achievable by all concerned; and,∙some means of monitoring performance against the plan.Since there will always be differences between the actual and the plan, you need some form of control. Beyond a certain organisational size, control can only be exercised by delegation; the human aspect of control is, therefore, important.Why keep records?Accurate record keeping is required if you are to be effective in monitoring performance against budget. Other reasons why you will need to keep accurate records are:∙there is a legal obligation to do so;∙any shareholders may want accounts;∙the VAT inspectors will need them;∙HM Revenue and Customs will require them;∙potential suppliers may require them;∙you will need to report accurate figures to your stakeholders;∙you will need to identify areas of possible concern; and,∙you will need to investigate and explain variances (under or overspends against your budget).Accounting records will need to be detailed enough for you to be able to say at any one time what the financial position is; ie, how much cash is in the business or the budget? How much do you owe? How much is owed to you? How big is the overdraft (or overspend)? How long could bills be paid for if cash stopped flowing in? What is the profit margin?Financial control will be poor if there are no clear objectives and a lack of knowledge of the basic information necessary to run a business or departmentsuccessfully. A lack of appreciation of the cash needs for a given rate of activity and a tendency to assume that poor results stem from economic conditions or even bad luck will only exacerbate the situation.Accounting centresOne way of delegating financial responsibility is to set up a system of accounting centres. Where businesses make a range of products, putting each into a different accounting centre makes it easier to determine which of the products are profitable. Some costs (eg factory rent) are more difficult to allocate, so may be recorded in a holding account and then split between products. Indirect costs could be allocated by the proportion of sales represented by each product (by volume or cost), by proportion of machine time used, or by some other appropriate method.This split will give an indication of the profitability of each product, but you should beware of ceasing sales of a particular product because of low profit or loss - the costs currently charged to that accounting centre would have to be redistributed among those remaining, so necessitating increased sales of those products.There are four possible levels of financial responsibility with appropriate targets and control requirements:∙revenue centre - staff only have responsibility for income (eg a sales department in a store). Staff have sales targets against which income is measured and compared;∙cost centre - staff have responsibility for keeping costs within set targets, but do not have to worry about where the money comes from (eg an NHS Trust department);∙profit centre - staff have more responsibility and control and will agree targets of profitability and absolute levels of profit (eg a division within a larger company). Control is achieved throughmonitoring performance as measured by the profit and loss account (P&L); they are unable, however, to invest in new equipment; and,∙investment centre - the staff have authority over investments and the use of assets (eg a subsidiary company) although the holding company would typically need to approve major investment. Targetswould focus on return on capital and control would be through monitoring performance measured bythe complete accounts.2 Management Information SystemsIf your financial control is to be effective you need to regularly analyse your actual performance figures and compare them against the financial plan and, perhaps, performance of the business historically.An easy way of comparing actuals and budgets is variance analysis. Usually, only a few figures need to be watched regularly to achieve effective control. Using a computer-based spreadsheet will assist you with all your analysis requirements.Having a suitable management information system (MIS) is a prerequisite for effective monitoring. Although it might sound daunting, an MIS can be extremely simple. An MIS is simply a set of procedures set up by you and your staff to ensure that data about the business is collected, recorded, reported and evaluated quickly and efficiently. That information is then used to check the progress of the business and to control it effectively. For most small businesses, there are likely only to be a few key elements.∙Marketing monitoring - Are you achieving your sales targets, in terms of level of sales and market share? How full is your order book? Are customers paying the right price?∙Production- How does the level of output compare with the level of sales?What is the percentage of rejects? How does the actual cost compare with the standard cost?∙Staff monitoring - Are they being effective? Are they satisfied and motivated?∙Financial control - Are you meeting your financial targets?You will need proper systems in place to ensure that:∙You keep careful track of everything bought by the business, especially if the person ordering is not the person who pays the bills;∙You record everything sold by the business and that everything is properly invoiced, especially if the person doing the selling is not the person who raises the invoices or chases customers for payment;∙There is an effective stock control system which records incoming raw materials and compares them against purchase orders, monitors progress through the production stages (if appropriate) and records the dispatch of finished goods; and,∙All payments and receipts are recorded to ensure that bank balances and overdraft limits are kept within agreed levels.Computerised accounting packages and spreadsheets make it relatively straightforward to record data and present it in an easily understood format. It still requires discipline to ensure that the data is collected, but making an effort will be rewarded through improved understanding of your business.The key to an effective MIS is to ensure that you only monitor a small number of figures and that those figures relate back to the strategic objectives and the operational objectives that you have set for your business. If other people needto see the figures, ensure that they get them speedily. If your system of financial control is to be successful, figures must be quickly available after month end.一个财务管理系统,该系统的改进与成功重点当然,我们并不是说,企业应该忽视对他们的现金抽屉审慎控制。
中英文对照外文翻译文献(文档含英文原文和中文翻译)原文:Auditing And AdministrationSchools of public administration over the years have given attention bordering on idol worship to "who gets what, when, and how." In some ways that worship is understandable. Public budgeting and the appropriations process are at the heart of policy and decision making in American government. Schools and programs in public administration teach budgeting under a variety of titles. When contemplating career opportunities, their students learn that budgeting is where the action is.Regrettably, little attention has been given in American public administration to issues of accountability how funds are used; how their use is reported to the public; and what impact funding has had. Auditing raises these questions and provides answers.' But auditing is little known in public administration circles and, with fewexceptions, public administration does not teach auditing.' The concept of financial, efficiency, and effectiveness accountability is almost foreign to public administration students and to public managers. The current interest in program evaluation by executive branch agencies does not address the deeper and more lasting issues: how are public sector managers to report to legislators on the use of public resources? Can this be accomplished as an integral part of the budget process? Public administration programs must explore answers to these questions.Since mid-1990s public executive agencies in the United States have dramatically expanded evaluation activities. This expansion has been marked by the establishment of large planning and evaluation staffs in cabinet level departments of the federal government, the publication of numerous books on the topic, the appearance of journals devoted exclusively to evaluation, and the introduction of evaluation courses and fields of concentration at major universitiesNevertheless, the considerable growth and change of formal post audit and evaluation activities at the state legislative level has gone largely unnoticed. The U.S. General Accounting Office GAO, created in 1921, has received somewhat more attention. However, its important role as a congressional agency is still not well understood. State legislatures evaluate existing government programs departments require authorization for new programs. But the publication of formal performance audit reports has become a widespread phenomenon only in the1970s. The number of performance-type reports sent to the Legislative Program Evaluation Section LPES Clearinghouse at the Eagleton Institute of Politics of Rutgers University has grown from five reports published in 1971 by one New York State agency to 134 reports published by state legislative audit agencies in 20 states in 1977.The growth of performance audit reports reflects the growth of the organizations which produce them. The Council of State Governments reported that in 1998 there were only five states where sole post audit responsibilities rested with a legislative auditor. By the mid-1970s the number had grown to 25 and in others the legislatures shared post audit responsibility with executive branch agencies. By the 1977-78 biennium 44 states had at least one legislative staff agency with primary responsibilityfor the post audit function.Regrettably, little attention has been given in American public administration to issues of accountability? how funds are used; how their use is reported to the public; and what impact funding has had.There are two major structural approaches to performanceAuditing in state legislatures. One places the performance auditing capacity in the office of the legislative auditor. In most cases the legislative auditor and his staff are responsible to a legislative audit committee which includes members of both chambers and political parties. Traditionally, legislative auditors confined their activities to financial and compliance audits. Recently, auditors have increased efforts to assess not only efficiency but also the effectiveness of state agencies and programs.In 1967, for example, the Montana Office of the Legislative Auditor placed the performance auditing capacity in the legislative auditor's office. Before 1973, however, the office produced only financial-compliance audits. Since then the auditor has issued performance audits covering topics such as workmen's compensation, the state motor vehicle pool, and milk price regulations. In addition, eight sunset reviews have been carried out, covering state regulatory boards such as those on accountants, plumbers, and banks. Other states which employ the post audit approach include California, Hawaii, Illinois, Kansas, Minnesota, and TennesseeThe establishment of a special purpose legislative audit or evaluation committee with its own professional staff is a second approach to building a performance audit capacity. These staffs generally conduct performance reviews, while the more traditional audit work is left to the states' audit agencies. In all cases these committees include members of both political parties. The Connecticut Program Review and Investigations Committee, established in 1972, is an example of the special purpose committee approach. Originally limited strictly to performance evaluations, the committee received statutory power in 2001 conduct investigations authorized by legislative resolution. In 1999 the legislature gave the committee the responsibility to conduct sunset reviews. The committee, with a staff of about 10, has published 12 program evaluations on topics such as vocational education, medicaid, and juvenilecorrections. It also has conducted investigations of the Department of Environmental Protection and civil rights compliance by several departments. Other states using this structural approach include Massachusetts, Mississippi, New York, Virginia, and Washington.Despite the different structures for performance audit efforts, staff directors agree on the need to recruit staff without regard to political affiliation. Most staffs include fewer than 15 professional employees. Almost all agencies try to hire people with varied educational backgrounds.The most prevalent academic disciplines include business and public administration, and the social sciences. A few staffs include lawyers, behavioral and natural scientists, and statisticians. Staff directors believe that basic research competence, analytical ability, and oral and written communication skills are more important than backgrounds in specific fields. In contrast, individuals with strong backgrounds in accounting and finance continue to perform financial audits. Most state legislative audit staffs follow the general guidelines set down in the GAO's 1972 "Yellow Book," Standards for Audit of Governmental Organizations, Programs, Activities, and Functions. The Yellow Book covers standards for audit work such as staff qualifications, planning, supervision, evidence, reporting, and review .One major difference among the staffs is the degree to which legislators participate in various stages of the projects. In most states legislators formally chose the topics for study while the staff always designs the audit reviews and collects the data. In a few states legislators participate by holding legislative hearings, visiting program sites, or in one state even assisting in interviews. Staff personnel analyze the data, reach conclusions, and draft audit reports.In almost all states the staff drafts recommendations. Legislators normally participate in the recommendations process through adopting, modifying, or rejecting them. Adoption by legislators can mean merely rubberstamping staff recommendations or actively debating and altering those recommendations.Most legislative audit agencies send a copy of completed final reports for comment to the executive branch agency under review. These comments arepublished as part of the reports. Many post audit agencies conduct regular report flow-up activities Annual staff reports note the extent of progress in implementing report recommendations by the legislature and executive branch. State legislative auditors are placing renewed emphasis on the specific uses made of the reports by both legislative and executive officials.The considerable growth and change of formal post audit and evaluation activities at the state legislative level has gone largely unnoticed.Executive agency officials do not always view the process this way. They fall into the ready trap that if only more money were available more good would result. If left to themselves, it seems likely that public works and highway departments would surely pave the whole nation with concrete. This type of agency thinking gave birth to a wildlife flyway and feeding system proposed for varied species of fowl as they crossed through the Tennessee Valley .When presented to the Board of Directors of the Tennessee Valley Authority, officials estimated that 100,000 birds, including innumerable ducks, could be expected to use the system. When the board chairman discovered the cost would be $100,000, he exclaimed: "My God, that a buck a duck!" No one knows if feeding a duck on its way to wintering in better weather is worth a dollar, but it is not a bad way to think about the flyway and feeding system program.Overly zealous quest for audit implementation, however, can lead auditors to avoid important areas, where either controversy or disinterest could result in a lack of action on staff recommendations. This would impair, rather than assist, legislators in their oversight responsibilities.The easiest way to improve an audit implementation score is to learn what key officials want and then put it in an audit report. No one advocates that strategy. Simply providing objective information for consideration in future decisions is a crucial task of performance audit-evaluation.Many audit-evaluations bring to the attention of key officials potential problems before they become actual and costly ones. A Kansas audit on water use policies recommended ways to improve existing water laws and integrate current informationabout water use for more effective management of current water resources. The audit has served as a study document for legislative hearings and regional conferences on water use, and its findings and recommendations should enable planners to make better decisions on water supply years from now.Many important effects of the audit process are intangible and thus not readily susceptible to measurement. The labels "watch dog" and "bird dog" did not come to audit agencies by accident. Audits of government agencies have long been considered valuable because they are believed to help minimize fraud, waste, mismanagement, and unrealistic budget requests. Like a regular medical examination, this "preventive effect" is valuable but difficult to measure in dollars. There are instances of officials resigning after completion of an audit in protest, in anger, or in sad recognition of the audit's accuracy. Such resignations-like that following publication of the South Carolina Medicaid Audit-are not evidence of implementation in any precise sense, but lend support to the view that good audit work promotes better management.There seems to be great enthusiasm for distributing appropriate shares of the public purse, but little concern for evaluating what is accomplished with the shares.Audit work requires objectivity, professionalism, and freedom from political pressures, which suggests a considerable degree of independence within the legislative setting. This difficult balancing act looks more precarious when one considers the evidence produced in the seven case studies? two of the seven key factors likely to lead to audit implementation are legislator approval of audit report topics and legislator interest in the audits. These factors suggest the need for a strong sensitivity and linkage to the legislature. The most promise of reconciling these contradictory strong forces lies in a healthy term of office for the head audit official, with difficult removal provisions, and the power of staff appointment reserved to the chief auditor.Without such assurances, the controversy which inevitab inevitably surrounds performance audit work is likely to bring disappointing results-less than totally objective work performed by a less than totally professional staff. The schools of public administration have not played a major role in the development of public sectorauditing. Yet many of the leading concerns of government auditing should be the concerns of public administration.Few professors of public administration teach auditing of any variety. Courses in legislatures as organizations are scarce. Those that exist focus primarily on law-making and usually ignore the oversight and accountability responsibilities of legislatures.The direction of courses in public administration schools is subject to many competing emphases: for example, behavioral research, quantitative research, and institutional research. None of these options should allow students to escape from some basic core work in economics and finance, research techniques statistics, interviewing, surveys, etc., accounting, and oral and written communications-all of which are essential to understanding and performing effective audit and oversight work. Given the lack of exposure to auditing, it is not surprising that so many eager young public administration students go forth seeking policy analysis positions- if they cannot immediately be president, governor, or secretary of state, they at least want to tell him how he should do his job. There is little interest in the mechanics of understanding how and whether government works, and in improving service delivery. There seems to be great enthusiasm for distributing appropriate shares of the public purse, but little concern for evaluating what is accomplished with the shares.Pubic administration has failed American governmental and financial administration by not stressing that public officials must be held accountable for the financial resources entrusted to them. Accountability includes financial, compliance, and performance auditing. Careful financial reporting and auditing is required. Periodic outside examinations of organizational and program efficiency and effectiveness should be understood and welcomed. Public administration education and training should stress accountability in general and the audit function in particular. Such education is long the audit function in particular. Such education is long overdue.译文:审计和管理多年以来,公共行政管理学校在对公共资金问题上给予了足够重视,这些问题包括“谁得到什么,在什么时候,以及通过怎样的方式得到。