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Describes the Auckland, New Zealand, sharemarket of the early 1880s which possessed many features in common with the same sharemarket 100 years later. Creative accounting practices and questionable auditing judgements were some of these shared features. The Auckland sharemarket was dominated by an elite group of businessmen who controlled most of the leading companies. When the market collapsed in 1886 many of these companies experienced grave financial difficulties. Focuses on the accounting and auditing contribution to these difficulties.

The purpose of this paper is to examine Tongan businesses in New Zealand, bearing in mind that they have shared mixed success. Faced with the challenges of competition, compliance, and financial and operational management, these businesses are characterised by a relatively higher failure rate.

A series of open‐ended interview‐type sessions called talanoa were carried out to study their business practices and how these were linked to sustainability. These data were then triangulated with talanoa sessions carried out with business advisers who had worked with many of those Tongan businesses. Further information was collected during individual and group sessions with members of the Tongan community regarding Tongan businesses practices from both a general and a customer perspective.

The results of the talanoa sessions support a theoretical framework that suggests that an entrenched Tongan culture based on a “commons” mentality of sharing is partly responsible for a relatively high failure rate in an “anti‐commons” environment. The findings also suggest that certain aspects of the Tongan culture, in the form of social capital, support business sustainability.

The data gained from the talanoa sessions are based on a small number of Tongan businesses, Pacific business consultants and members of the Tongan community in New Zealand. The findings are therefore not statistically generalisable, although they do provide insights to guide further research in this area.

The findings are likely to provide benefits to a number of key stakeholders including Tongan businesses, policy makers, Government business assistance programmes and the wider small business community.

The research project introduces traditional talanoa to qualitative business research. The findings are specific to Tongan business operating in a western commercial context and provide insights into the drivers of business success and failure for the growing Pacific business community in New Zealand.

This paper seeks to reply/comment on the paper by Keith Hooper et al., titled “‘Knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing’: accounting for heritage assets”.

This note uses the economic theory of public goods to complement the explanation and analysis of Hooper et al's article on accounting for public heritage assets by New Zealand museums.

Using public goods theory from economics, the paper explains why the “sector neutral” approach, which underlies the application of commercial accounting standards to public heritage assets, is unsound; why “fair market prices” cannot be obtained for public heritage assets because of their being public goods; and why they should be accounted for outside the statement of financial position as assets held in trust by the custodial entities.

The opposition of some of the museums to the accounting standards being imposed on them is soundly based in the economic theory of public goods.

Many studies have discussed mutual funds performance, especially about the persistence of excess returns. Regression is the most common method to be used to research the fund persistence. Dutta (2002) proposes a simpler approach – a direct annual examination of whether a fund beats a market proxy or not, to research the persistence in American mutual fund returns. In this study, authors use a similar methodology to analyse New Zealand growth mutual funds. In addition, a statistically robust method is juxtaposed as a comparison. The study finds that the most of the funds sampled during the period 1996‐2003 are unable to better the benchmark of the world index.

This paper discusses the designing of a capital gains tax for New Zealand. The essential question is not why such a system is needed but what type of system should be implemented. The paper ignores the political discussion of whether such a tax is necessary and concentrates on design and implementation issues. Drawing from other tax jurisdictions, chiefly the United Kingdom and Australia, this article discusses the merits of tapering relief; indexation (now frozen in Australia); specific exemptions (e.g. owner occupied property); and of re‐defining capital assets into discrete categories which may be treated differently. The aim of the study is to open up the issue of capital gains for informed discussion: how such a tax should be administered, and the possibilities and likely difficulties involved in implementing such a tax.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the funding criteria adopted by funding organisations (FOs) in New Zealand.

The naturalistic inquiry paradigm is applied and qualitative interview data were collected using semi‐structured interviews.

The most important finding is that there is a strong pattern emerging as to how the selected FOs determine the allocation of their funds. Outcomes and key people are important criteria for these FOs, while financial information is regarded as less relevant. On balance, the New Zealand funders involved in this study seem to adopt a creative approach to allocating their funds. To explain the lack of performance and financial measurements, it may be that, unlike their for‐profit counterparts, not‐for‐profit (NFP) organisations' managers are not constrained by returns to shareholders, earnings per share and the bottom line. Thus, many of the New Zealand funders' allocations rely on an instinctive feel for the projects proposed and the character of the applicants proposing them.

A limitation of the research is that it was restricted to Auckland and Wellington and only to those FOs which were willing to participate. It is not possible to generalise the results and apply the findings derived based on seven FOs to all the funders in New Zealand. This research is an exploratory study; further research would be appropriate across Australasia to include larger centres such as Sydney and Melbourne where there are many more FOs.

Funders are in favour of a more creative and soft approach to their philanthropic giving. It is hoped that this research will raise an awareness of a strong tendency of FOs to adopt a creative approach to grant‐making rather than the more scientific approach involving financial analysis.

The outcomes and key people are important to this grant‐making process, while much financial information is less relevant.

The paper recommends that FOs should pay more attention to financial analysis while preserving the flexibility of a creative approach. Moreover, grant seekers will have a much clearer idea about what sort of information most grant makers actually utilise in their grant decision‐making processes. The additional contribution of this research project is to enrich the existing literature on philanthropic funding in New Zealand.

Although the Cold War is over, the dangers of international armed conflict remain. Multinational talks about restricting the arms trade stalled in 1992. If they resume, what should the British attitude be towards participation in a multilateral agreement to limit arms exports when such exports apparently make a significant contribution to the UK economy? Sensible public debates and choices need information on the likely economic impacts of alternative scenarios. This paper examines the likely effects of a one‐third reduction in the value of UK arms exports. It finds that between 13,333 and 40,000 jobs would be lost and that of those that remain in the labour force over half will find new work within a year. The South‐West would be the worst affected region losing 0.3 per cent of all jobs; defence sales would be cut by between 3 and 8 per cent; aerospace output would be cut by between 5 and 9 per cent , and total exports would fall by 0.5 per cent. There would be initial adverse effects but, over time, resources would be re‐allocated to other industries and regions.

Considers rhetoric and discourse in financial accounting and how rhetoric/discourse was employed by the directors of a New Zealand property company. The particular case cited is that of the New Zealand Land Company 1882‐1890. Shows how land may be transferred from indigenous owners and redistributed by means of various discursive and accounting techniques. The sources used include archival records, parliamentary reports and articles from contemporary colonial newspapers. Concludes that the accounting information available provided a legitimizing discourse, which enabled some to benefit at the expense of others. Many of these observations are believed to be timeless.

This paper outlines and exemplifies the use of a method for analysing power relations based on the work of French social theorist, Michel Foucault. The overall research aim of genealogical analysis is to produce “a history of the present”, a history which is essentially critical with its focus on locating forms of power, the channels it takes and the discourses it permeates. Research combining Foucauldian theorisation and method necessarily involves a selective search for injustice and subjection to reveal plausible alternatives to more pervasively modernist histories, which tend to revere progress. Salient features of a genealogical research method are detailed in the context of an actual research project previously conducted by the authors and reproduced here for the purposes of exemplification explicitly as a genealogy.