Investigating the Governmental Accounting Reform of Greek National Health System (ESY): Some preliminary Evidence
During the last decades, several countries worldwide have introduced financial management reforms as an important part of the New Public Management (NPM) initiative at one or more levels of government sector, by replacing or transforming their traditional budgetary cash accounting systems towards business-like accrual accounting. Following the example of this upcoming managerial trend, the Greek government introduced in 1997 an accrual based accounting system (ABAS) and double-entry book-keeping method in all public hospitals. The hospital sector is one of the areas where NPM reforms have been introduced in search of higher efficiency in service production. The purpose of this paper is twofold. Our first goal is to provide an overview of the government sector reform initiatives in Greece and to present evidence regarding the adoption rate of the new accounting system by the Greek public health sector. The second goal of our research is to present the perceived usefulness of the accounting information provided by the proposed accounting reform as well as the implementation problems encountered in implementing ABAS. Our analysis is based on the results of an empirical survey that took place during 2008. For the purposes of this survey, a structured questionnaire was prepared and sent to the Finance Directors of 132 Greek public hospitals.
|Date of creation:||23 Jun 2009|
|Date of revision:||03 Sep 2009|
|Publication status:||Published in International Journal on Governmental Financial Management 2.9(2009): pp. 73-97|
|Contact details of provider:|| Postal: |
Web page: http://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de
More information through EDIRC
When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:pra:mprapa:19649. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.
For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: (Ekkehart Schlicht)
If references are entirely missing, you can add them using this form.