PROPERTY, PLANT AND EQUIPMENT: AN EXPLORATORY STUDY OF LISTED FIRMS AND LOCAL GOVERNMENT

The Bachelor of Science Accounting of Guarda Polytechnic Institute prepares students for being professionals in private and public organizations. Due the complexity of tasks and environments, then the understanding of the accounting for property, plant and equipment could be different. Indeed, Higher Education offer systematic learning and development processes where the student could capture from the corporate accounting and law module, the necessary knowledge, attitudes and skills of basic concepts of financial accounting, especially in this area. Also, they are prepared to detail all the relevant information and to present the financial statements with investment politics and strategies.

The motivation of this research is to explore the understanding of accounting for property, plant and equipment of the business in a cross-cultural context of private and public organizations, which it has been rare to observe in the literature. Also, the research process concentrates on the learning objectives and on the need to providing training, on accounting practices actions that improve skills and experiences. Indeed, the investment decisions are one of the fundamental areas, but listed firms of Portuguese Stock Market and Local Government Entities prescribe a different accounting treatment in fixed assets, in general, and property, plant and equipment, in particular.

This research presents a theoretical framework that allows to discuss the importance of the curriculum design in order to achieve appropriate level of knowledge, attitudes and skills in accounting for property, plant and equipment. At the same time, the empirical analyses promoted at an exploratory level are based on two differentiate samples: listed firms of Portuguese Stock Market and Local Government Entities enterprises, located in Portugal.
The main result is the heterogeneity of the performance of the two samples and the function of a standard of comparison allows observing different behaviour on investment decisions, testing multivariate differences among groups of enterprises and reflecting events occurring in private and public organizations. Another result is the encouragement of students to focus on this dichotomy between practical experiences and theoretical framework of the business itself and to ensure that the future accountant is one of the main professional that deal with different aspects on the accountability.