The domestic accounting standards vary
among the ASEAN members, which may lead
to a different level of improvement on fi nancial
reporting quality. It is predicted that countries
with smaller differences between their domestic
accounting standards and IFRS or IAS have better
improvement than countries with larger difference.
The absence index developed by Ding et al. (2007)
is adopted to measure the gap between domestic
accounting standards of ASEAN members and IFRS.
It measures the extent to which the rules regarding
certain accounting issues that required by IFRS are
missing in the domestic accounting standards. The
accounting differences with IAS are listed in four
categories: