The EU’s Adoption of IFRS and the Implication for China : In the Perspective of Accounting Quality and Information Comparability

Globalization has led to the growth of international financial markets, as one of the results, the EU adopted IFRS in 2005 to meet the need of accounting globalization and harmonization. This action has triggered a debate about whether the adoption of IFRS is beneficial to accounting quality and information comparability. Meanwhile, China, playing a key role in the global economic development stage, realizes the importance of accounting harmonization and attempts to move towards the IFRS as well. However, to reach the goal that the Chinese companies produce financial statements that are the same as those that apply IFRS, there is still a long way to go. The purpose of this thesis is to examine whether the adoption of IFRS by EU has enhanced the quality of financial reporting and accounting information comparability. Additionally, the thesis further identified the seminal undertakings for the convergence of IFRS in Europe and pointed out the implication for China’s convergence with IFRS. The empirical findings in this thesis were obtained through qualitative interviews. The empirical findings suggest that accounting quality and information comparability has been enhanced with EU’s strong and full enforcement with IFRS. With the confidence in IFRS which is gained from the success of the EU’s adoption of IFRS, a coherent result was found that the convergence towards IFRS would also benefit China in accounting quality and information comparability, and further lead to more international investments. However, when it comes to the question whether China should emulate EU’s example to adopt IFRS directly or keep CAS (Chinese Accounting Standards) which is similar to IFRS, two mixed opinions were obtained basically from Europe side and China side. Through in-depth analysis with these empirical findings, the conclusion is that it is necessary for China to take steps to build intensive programs to enhance its capacity of the adoption of IFRS, so that it could adapt itself to the fact that the IFRS is already making its way around the world as a single set of high quality global accounting standards.