Abstract This article discusses the teaching of social accounting. In the last ten years, the two fields--accounting and economics have been drawn closer together, because professional accountants and professional economists increasingly utilize the same data in their work. The highly technical literature on depreciation policy and inventory valuation is sufficient to indicate that an unequivocal concept of either business income or national income is scarcely possible under current conditions. In other words, an accountant or an economist frequently must outline his own set of definitions, the over-riding consideration being the usefulness of the definitions, with the long-term aim of achieving greater uniformity. In the development of useful accounting principles, the practitioner has not confined himself to transactions made within business enterprise. Generally speaking, practicing and teaching accountants have not devoted enough effort to the bold experiment of correlating their discipline with that of the many-faceted field of modern economics.
Mary E. Murphy (Tue,) studied this question.