The governance function of government accounting

摘要

The core of the New Public Management is to establish a transparent, efficient and scientific government. As an institutional arrangement, the government accounting is playing an important role in improving administrative capacity and administrative efficiency, and promoting the reform of the public administration. Around the improvement of government efficiency, this paper analyzes the principal-agent problem of government firstly. We find there existing serious rent-seeking and corruption in the process of governance due to the information asymmetry, and the government accounting can inhibit this phenomenon by reducing the degree of information asymmetry. Secondly, from the perspective of the technology tool, transparency is an optimized way of governance, which is closely related to the government accounting information systems. We also find government accounting improve the transparency from the risk prevention, performance evaluation and budget execution, etc. Some, although not all, of these perspectives predict the government accounting function of government.