International Differences in IFRS Policy Choice and the Persistence of Accounting Classification: The Case of China

This paper focuses on the application of IFRS standards in China. The research is mainly conducted on the basis of Kvaal and Nobes’s studies (2010) regarding the different ways that various countries apply IFRS and Nobes’s IFRS accounting classification system (2011). For companies that issued B shares, the use of IFRS in China lasted only until the 2006 ASBE (Accounting Standards for Business Enterprises) reform. The present study examines IFRS overt options in an attempt to 1) review the choices made by Chinese companies to discover – in light of the applicable PRC GAAP (Chinese Local Standards) requirement of that time – whether they were more or less likely to choose an option than the other countries analysed by Nobes & Kvaal; 2) rank China’s place within Nobes’s accounting classification system; and 3) rank China’ place, again in the Nobes’s model but also in light of a recent study based on BRICS (Note 1)countries (Sarquis, et al. 2014). The results of the statistical analysis confirm that Chinese financial statements display a “local” nature in their use of IFRS and that in its accounting tendencies, China belongs to the Continental European group rather than with the other BRICS countries.