This paper analyses six recent studies dealing with the measurement of international harmonization of financial reporting. Methodological issues and problems relating to the definition and operationalization of terms, sources of data, statistical methods and causation are discussed, and an alternative methodology for measuring harmonization suggested.

Van der Tas' comment (1992) on our article (Tay and Parker, 1990) is greatly appreciated for two reasons: first, as he points out, and as evidenced by our article, there is little research in the field of measuring international harmonization and standardization; second, because his original paper (van der Tas, 1988) was instrumental in beginning our evaluation of different measurement approaches.We consider our article a preliminary examination of the issues involved in the measurement of harmonization and standardization. It did not include an example of the measurement approach we proposed, as we did not have what we had suggested were the necessary data, nor had we concluded which (if any) of the available concentration measures and tests of statistical significance to apply. These issues have been addressed in a more comprehensive work (Tay, 1989), and will be dealt with below. STUDIES EXAMINED Measuring HarmonizationOnly two of the six studies we reviewed contained the word 'harmonization' in their title, and explicitly cited harmonization measurement as a formal objective. In the four other studies, however, compliance with IASC standards was more or less explicitly linked with harmonization, indicating, to our minds, that the authors of those studies had assumed that greater compliance with IASC standards would be equivalent to greater harmony of financial reporting. Compliance with IASC Standards and HarmonizationWe recognize, as does van der Tas, the difference between the two phenomena of compliance with IASC standards and accounting harmonization, hence the distinction we drew between de jure and de facto harmonization. The point which

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