Recent decades have seen a growing pursuit of convergence of the national accounting standards with IFRS around the world.

Required:

a) Discuss the fundamental drivers of convergence and rationalise your view on whether achieving full convergence is a feasible objective, giving particular consideration to the implications of the adoption of IFRS for emerging economies.

b) In their seminal paper, Perry and Nolke (2006) argued that proliferation of IFRS and the growing reliance of such standards on the fair value accounting principle "reflects and reinforces changed relations of production in which the financial sector increasingly dominates the productive sector". Evaluate the relative strength of the above claim and critically evaluate any other arguments you are aware of that are commonly put forward by the proponents and/or opponents of fair value accounting.