Changes in public sector accounting in a number of Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries over the 1980s were central to the rise of the "New Public Management" (NPM) and its associated doctrines of public accountability and organizational best practice. This paper discusses the rise of The New Public Management (NPM) as an altemative to of public accountability embodied in progressive-era public administration ideas. It argues that, in spite of allegations of in internationalization and the adoption of a new global paradigm in public management, there was considerable variation in the extent to which different Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries adopted The New Public Management over the 1980s. It further argues that conventional explanations of the rise of The New Public Management (NPM) ("Englishness", party political incumbency, economic performance record and government size) seen hard to sustain even from a relatively brief inspection of such cross-national data as are available, and that an explanation based on initial endowment may give us a different perspective on those changes.