The impact of international accounting standard nº 41 “Agriculture” in the wine industry

Abstract

The increasing relevance of fair value as measurement adversely to historical cost put on the agenda of the main accounting standard setting bodies the determination of it is value and afterly its register. This has been shown by recent standard’s amendments and issues that enable or even demand the valorisation of certain fair value's elements. The scarce importance given by normalization entities to the agricultural activity lead to the increasingly demanding harmonization of this sector. Aware of this situation, the IASB issued IAS 41, which specifically addresses the fair value measurement of biological assets and agricultural goods. In this paper we will talk about the wine industry. We have chosen this specific industry based on its relevance compared to other agriculture industries. We analyse the impact of IAS 41 and its development, given particular emphasis to the perspective of some of the main players in the standard draft. Finally, this paper comprises an empirical study based on an inquiry sent to a set of companies that are classified as wine industry (CAE 15931). In an empirical level, the methodology used varies accordingly to the different issues pretended. In this way to evaluate the impact of IAS 41 and of fair value changes we used a set of non-parametric tests, such as the test of signs and the Wilcoxon test. The application of these methodologies allowed us to conclude that the adoption of fair value would result in a positive impact on earnings. This will lead to a rise in the companies' gains, since standardization establishes that fair value’s fluctuations shall be included on the result of operations over the period in which it arises. In order to understand which relevant factors in standard’s application are, we adopt the descriptive, factor, principal components, clusters and discriminant analysis. Although, the study’s limitations, we have analysed the results, which allowed us to conclude that the inquired gave more relevancy to the variables related to the applicability of the standard and the experience and knowledge of this and other standards, this is, they consider the applicability of the standard relevant for the sector.