Identifying the Classification of EU Countries by an Alternative Variable: The “Stakeholders’ Perception”

Abstract

Since the first part of 20th century, there was a strand of literature that analyze international differences in financial accounting practices and use these differences to classify countries into groups having similar characteristics. For a long time, the two main accounting systems that have been analyzed in these studies were the Anglo-Saxon accounting system and the Continental Europe one. Notwithstanding the last decades have been characterized by a widespread harmonization process through an extensive and often compulsory adoption of IAS/IFRSs, the situation did not changed so much, because there are still a lot of relevant differences in applying IAS/IFRSs. The aim of this research is to contribute to the literature in theme of countries classification using a different type of variable: the “stakeholders’ perception” instead of “accounting practices”. Using a quantitative statistic methodology, the cluster analysis, we identify a three-groups classification of the EU countries based on the answers about the costs and benefits of IFRS implementation issued in EU public Consultation, launched ten years after their mandatory application.