Massimo Costa

Social, Environmental and Financial Information

This chapter tries to delineate the institutional external disclosure for every kind of concerns, including information beyond the strict financial domain.

The Concept of Value Beyond Economics: Social and Philosophical Roots for Corporate Social Responsibility

This paper tries to underline the importance of the concept of value for CSR and then to map the concept of value beyond Economics. In doing this it takes in consideration the Italian literature in a specific time in order to make a first step for a broader research that takes in consideration also other literatures and time.

On the italian debate concerning “Economia Aziendale”. The recent discovery of a manuscript by Emilio Ravenna (1930)

The paper relies upon the recent discovery of the textbook of Accounting adopted in Palermo’s High Business School (the ‘ancestor’ of the Faculty of ‘Economics & Business’, founded after in 1936), just in its first years of opening (academic year 1930-31). It is a printed manuscript. This book was written by the local professor of Accounting, Emilio Ravenna, who operated in Sicily between the last decades of XIX century and the first ones of XX one, commonly considered (Guzzo, 2003) an intermediate scholar between the ‘Venetian’ (Besta) and ‘Tuscan’ (Cerboni) Italian Schools, adhering to the former for the accounting method and to the latter for the general theory of administrative functions, but here revealing more as belonging to the latter. The book is placed within a period of strong debate for the Italian community, after Zappa’s manifesto for the new science of “Economia aziendale”, and also includes a full conception of Accounting as an open criticism to “Economia aziendale”. The interest for this discovery is due to the explicit answer to the defy launched at ‘Ca’ Foscari’ (University of Venice) by Gino Zappa. But the most relevant issue is that this answer does not come from the main ‘Venetian School’ of Besta disciples, then dominating in Italy, but from a true ‘survivor’ of the older ‘Tuscan School’, strictly follower of Giovanni Rossi work, and in those times already declined. It is noteworthy the fact Ravenna generally agrees with Zappa, confuting, however, only that his conceptions would be really new. The following paper, then, presenting the basic contents of the aforementioned book, with a peculiar stress on the doctrinal items concerning Accounting and “Economia aziendale”, reveals a continuity, perhaps overestimated by Ravenna, between the late XIX-century ‘Scientific Accounting’ by Cerboni and the early XX-century “Economia aziendale” by Zappa.

CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK AND MEASUREMENT: A SURVEY ON THE INTERNATIONAL DEBATE

In response to the ‘2011 Agenda Consultation’, the IASB launched in July 2013 a call for a new Discussion Paper on the ‘Conceptual Framework for Financial Reporting’. This article aims to offer a contribution to the debate on the effectiveness of the theme of ‘Measurement’, by investigating the use of the current evaluation models in the literature and practice of Financial Reporting. The article proposes at first a historical survey both of the international debate on Fair Value Accounting vs. Historical Cost Accounting and of the Italian theories on the valuation. Later the paper proposes some considerations about the key questions related to Measurement and the possible policy implications of the main research finding, by conceptualising a ‘mixed’ system combining fair value Accounting and historical cost Accounting to try giving a more rational base to the financial reports.