Influence of control system characteristics on the choice of management accounting techniques in an emerging economy: the case of the United Arab Emirates

Mayada Abd El-Aziz Youssef and Esam Eldin Moustafa

International Journal of Accounting and Finance, 2014, vol. 4, issue 4, 378-397

Abstract: There has been sustained interest in explaining why firms adopt different management accounting techniques (MATs). The study differs from prior studies in looking for relationships between the management control system (MCS) characteristics and the choice of a particular set of MATs in a sample of United Arab Emirates companies. Our findings reveal that budgetary performance measures, financial statement/ratio analysis, variance analysis and controllable cost analysis are highly adopted by UAE organisations. ABM and ABC, BSC, target costing and single rate overhead allocation are moderately adopted. The adoption rates of the advanced MATs are noticeably higher than their adoption rates usually found in the management accounting literature. The results also show that there are significant correlations between the performance evaluation and control MATs and the control over behaviour of employees and reliance on formal rules. Hence, certain MCS characteristics seem to encourage the use of certain MATs.

Keywords: management accounting techniques; MATs; management control systems; Whitley's model; Gulf Cooperation Council; GCC countries; United Arab Emirates; UAE; emerging economies. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
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