The role of accounting in sustainable development

Past decade has witnessed several changes in the process of conduct of business activities across the world especially due to the wave of globalization. It has also made drastic changes in the process of financial reporting, in particular the continuing adoption of IFRS (International Financial Reporting Standards) worldwide. IFRS are high quality, understandable, enforceable and globally acceptable accounting standards issued by IASB (International Accounting Standard Board). Thus these are a set of international accounting standards stating how a particular type of transaction and other events should be reported in the financial statements. Thus IFRS are designed as a common global language for business affairs so that company accounts are understandable and comparable across international boundaries. IFRS is becoming the global language of business with over 40% of the world adopting this as their standard for reporting. India also decided to converge to IFRS from 1st April 2016 in a phased manner, which in turn improves the financial statement comparability and transparency that helps to attract greater cross border investments. This paper focuses on the convergence of IFRS with Indian Accounting Standards, its utility, issues and challenges faced by the stakeholders. It also throws light to the ways through which problems can be addressed.

Almost all human activity spheres, from the health care system to the education system, were unprepared for the pandemic. This, in turn, has slowed down the progress in achieving sustainable development goals. The Sustainable Development Goals 4 “Quality Education” and 8 “Decent Work and Economic Growth” were particularly vulnerable. In addition, the widespread concern was caused in the context of the transition to a “knowledge-based economy”. This paper analyzes the readiness of the scientific community to provide preconditions for the acceleration of these SDGs achievements. To do this, a meta-analysis of the academic literature on SDG 4, SDG 8, and the knowledge-based economy during 2015–2021 was conducted. Several special methods and instruments were used, including Scopus, WoS, VosViewer, Publish or Perish, Google Trends, and Google Books Ngram Viewer. The results show the inability of the modern academic community to provide a theoretical and empirical framework for a successful transition to a knowledge-based economy, taking into account the need to achieve sustainability. This is partly due to the relative subject novelty and the lack of academic attention. The challenges posed by the pandemic (lockdowns, unemployment, closing of educational institutions, financial flows reorientation, etc.) together with potential threats (new pandemic, climate change, population displacement, armed conflicts, etc.) necessitate a radical intensification of academic activity in economics to achieve SDGs.

This study aims to provide an extensive overview of the current state of sustainability reporting through the review studies on sustainability reports (SR) in the accounting literature for the period 2015–2020. A structured literature review (SLR) methodology is used to investigate how the SR literature develops and focuses. The study uses keywords such as “sustainability report” and “sustainability reporting” to identify studies that are relevant to a given topic. A total of 44 published studies were found. This study identifies the main directions of SR research in the 2015–2020 period and discusses several important aspects of research, namely methodology, research methods, and the theory used. To enrich the results, this study defines the scope, country of research, topics and sectors studied. The study provides insight into future SR research used by researchers to develop SR research. Several things are proposed that can be used as a guide for future SR research, such as sustainability in SMEs and the public sector. Ensuring sustainability is one of the research topics that can be a direction for researchers in the future. Theories such as contingency and source credibility can be an alternative to explaining the reality of sustainability reporting.