The publication of International Public Sector Accounting Standards (IPSASs) in the field of governmental financial reporting has raised the necessity for a wide-ranging discussion about the harmonization of public sector accounting systems. The article has a double aim: to show the adoption or not of IPSASs in local and central government and to analyse the level of convergence between the different countries studied. In order to achieve these objectives, we carried out an empirical study, whose results allow us to show that while some accounting systems are very close to the IPSASs model, others are completely different. Nevertheless, we think that this could be a starting point and that in the near future countries could tend towards IPSASs more and more, which may be the most probable way to reach convergence accounting systems between them.

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A quantitative version of Krein's Theorem on convex hulls of weak compact sets is proved. Some applications to weakly compactly generated Banach spaces are given.

Summary During the last 30 years, many public administration reforms promoted by New Public Management have been undertaken. These reforms have spread to Latin‐American countries and include changes in governmental accounting systems, where the implementation of International Public Sector Accounting Standards (IPSASs) has been a stimulus for modernization. This article aims to clarify the situation of IPSASs implementation in the Latin‐American context as well as the stimuli for and effects of their implementation. The analysis shows that there is an emerging international trend to adopt IPSASs in Latin‐American countries although at the same time, there are evident obstacles to achieving reform goals. In Colombia, reforms are still underway, and the usefulness of IPSASs to improve decision‐making at an organisational level cannot be evaluated. Meanwhile, in Peru, the modernization is more rhetorical than real, and many efforts remain to be made for the effective implementation. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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