123 © The Author(s) 2019 J. Caruana et al. (eds.), Financial Sustainability of Public Sector Entities, Public Sector Financial Management, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-06037-4_7 CHAPTER 7 The Role of Public Sector Accounting on Financial Sustainability and Governmental Effectiveness Marco Bisogno and Beatriz Cuadrado-Ballesteros 1 INTRODUCTION This study aims to investigate the effects of accrual accounting adoption and the implementation of the International Public Sector Accounting Standards (IPSAS) on government’s effectiveness, as one of the key pillars of public entities’ fnancial sustainability. Despite some doubts expressed by scholars concerning both accrual accounting adoption (Guthrie 1998; Caperchione 2006; Wynne 2008; Barton 2009) and IPSAS implementation (Christiaens 2004; Bellanca 2014; Oulasvirta 2014; Christiaens et al. 2015), a large part of literature M. Bisogno (*) Department of Management and Innovation Systems, University of Salerno, Fisciano, Italy e-mail: mbisogno@unisa.it B. Cuadrado-Ballesteros Department of Management and Business Economics & Multidisciplinary Institute for Enterprise, University of Salamanca, Salamanca, Spain e-mail: u77171@usal.es