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

Authors: Mayada Abd El-Aziz Youssef; Esam Eldin Moustafa

Addresses: Accounting Department, College of Business and Economics, United Arab Emirates University, Abu-Dhabi, Al Ain, 15551, UAE; Accounting Department, Faculty of Commerce and Business Administration, Helwan University, Cairo, 11790, Egypt ' Accounting Department, College of Business and Economics, United Arab Emirates University, Abu-Dhabi, Al Ain, 15551, UAE

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.

DOI: 10.1504/IJAF.2014.066108

International Journal of Accounting and Finance, 2014 Vol.4 No.4, pp.378 - 397

Received: 11 Mar 2014
Accepted: 10 Sep 2014
Published online: 12 Dec 2014 *

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