due to the developments in the role of governments, the importance of government accounting and financial reporting is increasing. this led to changes in government accounting all over the world. for institutional, public finance and other reasons this has not always been done for central governments and regional and local governments in the same way. some countries maintain the cash basis, some changed over to the accrual basis. many of them started at first with lower government levels, only few changed over completely. comparative issues in government and accounting aims to give insight in the array of different patterns the world shows with respect to government accounting and financial reporting. of course a complete overview would have been too ambitious a goal. this book brings together an interesting number of academics coming from a representative number of countries to get an impression of the situation and especially of the existence and the backgrounds of similarities and differences. thirty-five authors and co-authors produced 21 chapters reflecting on the situations in 16 countries on 4 continents. countries dealt with are albania, australia, belgium, china, egypt, finland, france, japan, the netherlands, new zealand, norway, poland, russia, spain, the united kingdom and the united states.