Changes in public sector accounting in a number of OECD countries over the 1980s were central to the rise of the “New Public Management” and its associated doctrines of public accountability and organization best practice. This paper discusses the rise of New Public Management as an alternative to the tradition of public accountability embodied in progressive-era public administration ideas. It argues that, in spite of allegations of internationalization and the adoption of a anew global paradigm in public management, there was considerable variation in the extent to which different OECD countries adopted New Public Management (Englishness, party political incumbency economic performance record and government size) seem hard to sustain even from a relatively brief inspection of such cross-national data as are available, and explanation based on initial endowment may give us a different perspective on those changes.