The State of the Art in Assessing Foreign Currency Operations

Abstract

The rapid development of multinational companies (MNCs) has resulted in the need for accounting systems which function to report, evaluate and control international operations and their managers' effectiveness. While the problems surrounding the evaluation and control of domestic firms remain the same for MNCs' parent company managers, the question of which country's currency should be used in the evaluation process represents additional complexities for them. The choice is essentially either that of the parent company currency or the currency of the foreign subsidiary. Parent company managers may also use both of these currencies, but it is likely that this choice will result in different decisions regarding the performance of foreign operations (see Demirag, 1987,1987a, 1987b). The aim of this paper is to critically review the theoretical and empirical literature on the use of parent and/or foreign subsidiary accounting information used by multinational companies in the evaluation of their foreign subsidiary operations and managers. In doing so, the paper addresses the following two questions. First, to what extent is translated information, untranslated information or both types of information significant in the evaluation of foreign subsidiary operations and their managers' performance in MNCs? Second, what are the major contextual variables which influence MNC foreign currency accounting practices in performance evaluations?