The paper describes the process that took Australian Local Councils to a business-like accounting and highlights the role played in it by the accounting profession. Taken over by the Government in the standard setting process for the private sector, the Australian accounting profession set up...

In the last decade, Italian local Governments have made a massive use of limited companies to produce and to distribute public services, such as transportations, water maintainance, IT and the like. The public nature of the goals they are required to achieve and the public nature of the funds...

State-owned enterprises (SOEs) are legally private entities used in many jurisdictions to satisfy public needs, mostly through extensive consumption of public funds. While the nature of purposes pursued and of resources employed affects their accountability in a public sense, their financial...