ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the key concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. The book shows that cost accounting has been most closely associated with performance management. It provides the logical foundations for the connection between cost accounting and performance measures in benchmarking regimes. The book discusses the successful North Carolina Benchmarking Project, other notable government benchmarking systems do not use cost accounting to develop estimates of resources consumed when establishing benchmarks. It also discusses how different pricing arrangements can be used in public organizations to change citizen, consumer behavior, but these pricing decisions may need to be justified on a cost basis. The book also provides a descriptive and contingency theory analysis of cost accounting practices in Europe based upon the new public management (NPM) frame. Government cost accounting theory development is greatly hampered by its lack of a solid definition.
