A Review of the Essential Attribute and Economic Consequence of Management Accounting in China

This paper makes an analysis on the management accounting literatures within Core Journal Catalogue of Peking University from 1984 to 2018 and finds that there are three opinions about essential attributes of management accounting in current academic community of China, namely the theory of “management activity”, the theory of “information system” and the theory of “combination of accounting and management”, among which the theory of “management activity” represents the view of Chinese governmental departments and most of the scholars in the academic community. The empirical research result shows that both the management accounting system, management control system and specific management accounting tools and methods implemented by the enterprise can improve the positive performance of the enterprise. Moreover, implementation of management accounting system is conductive to improving the company’s transparency.