Sample selection and collection of responses

2163 The sample selection and collection of responses of each investigation are summarized as follows. The investigation selected 500 companies within which 67 are Japanese companies according to the sales rank of Fortune Global 500 of 2007. The questionnaires were sent to the CFO or senior managers of these companies. 115 useful responses were received the response rate 23 within which 57 are Japanese companies response rate is 89. In the current paper, we only analyze the data of Japanese companies. The companies which are permitted to optimally apply and are possible to be required to apply IFRS to their financial statements in the Interim IFRS Roadmap are those which have global financial or business activities. The investigated companies are possible to fall into the scope of optimal application and future mandatory application of IFRS.

5.3 Results and analysis

The respondent percentages reported in this paper are based upon the total number of responses to the questions. The design of the questionnaire allowed multiple answers for some questions. Consequently, the combined responses for some questions may exceed 100 percent. 1 Major finance sources and users of financial statements The first question asked the managers‘ views on the importance of domestic and overseas stock markets to their companies, as well as the importance of the stock market and bond market. 5 point Likert scale was used for measurement ranging from 1= not important at all, 3=not so important. 5= very important. As is shown in Figure 1, domestic market was regarded by the largest category, 65 respondents, as being very important to their business activities. 42 respondent indicated that domestic bond market was very important. 23 respondent rated the overseas stock market as either important or very important. Though the majority of respondents rated the overseas 2164 markets not as of the same importance as the domestic markets, in general, they do regarded overseas market as important. Figure 1 Importance of markets to Japanese business operations 2008 Table 1 Importance of Markets 2008 average Domestic stock market 4.508772 n=57 Domestic bond market 4.175439 n=57 Overseas stock market 3.614035 n=56 Overseas bond market 3.54386 n=56 Compared with domestic market, the perceived less importance of overseas markets may suggest that Japanese companies are relatively lack of attention to overseas users of financial statements that may lead to the lack of incentive to adopt international accounting standards. To confirm this, the second question in the questionnaire use 5point Likert scale as previously described, to sought how CFOs or senior managers view on the importance of financial statements to various users.