Sequence as explanation: The international politics of accounting standards

Abstract

ABSTRACT The gravitational pull of US capital markets in the early 1990s created incentives for foreign multinational companies and governments to adopt or converge to American accounting standards, US Generally Accepted Accounting Standards (US GAAP). Fifteen years later, more than a hundred countries had accepted (or planned to accept) a single set of accounting standards – yet not the American ones. Instead, a London-based private body had become the world's standard setter, and even in the US there was serious discussion about phasing out national standards for multinational companies. My explanation for change in the international politics of accounting standards emphasizes two conceptual tools featured in this special issue: cross-border sequencing effects and internal institutional configurations and capacity building. Unlike previous work that centers on the rise of private or technical authority or gives pride of place to either EU regional reform and capacity building or US developments, this article attributes the change in the politics of accounting standards to a sequence of developments that took place in the transatlantic political arena, inside and between these two large polities. The order and timing by which the US created and the EU emulated institutional configurations and regulatory capacities determined the particular set of transatlantic interactions. If the US or the EU had never developed these arrangements and capacities or had developed them in a different sequence or at different historical moments, transatlantic interactions would likely have followed an alternate path and generated different types of international politics.