A FIJIAN woman won an international award on her thesis on the development of a financial reporting standard for small to medium sized enterprises (SMEs).
Doctor Ronita Ram, a lecturer in Accounting at the University of Sydney Business School, has been highly commended in the prestigious Emerald/EFMD (European Foundation for Management Development) Outstanding Doctoral Research Awards.
Dr Ram was a gold medalist from the University of the South Pacific majoring in Accounting and Economics after which she was directly admitted to a PhD program at the University of Sydney.
A University of Sydney statement said she was highly commended in the category of 'Interdisciplinary accounting research', and her thesis was judged to have 'filled a gap' in the accounting standard setting literature.
"When it was established in 2001, the London-based International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) was constitutionally mandated to develop in the public interest a single set of high quality accounting standards to be used around the world by capital market participants," Dr Ram said in the statement.
She said this thinking seemed to be overturned when it added the SMEs project onto its agenda in 2003 and promulgated the eventual standard in 2009.
The university said Dr Ram's PhD thesis looked at how and why the IASB added the SMEs project to its agenda and followed closely the development of the IFRS for SMEs standard.
While the IASB is a private body, the university said many countries around the world comply with the standards set by it.
Dr Ram's thesis provides a better understanding of the IASB's agenda and its standard setting procedures.
"This very prestigious award recognises the quality of Ronita's thesis and reflects the high standard of research undertaken by the University of Sydney Business School," said the Chair of the School's Discipline of Accounting, Professor John Roberts.
The international Emerald/EFMD Awards are sponsored each year by the Emerald Group Publishing Limited, publishers of a large number of international business and management journals, and the European Foundation of Management Development.