Reflections of an Australian contemporary: The complementarity of entry and exit price current value accounting systems

One of the great controversies in accounting concerns the use of current value accounting systems in place of historical cost systems, and the relative merits of the two current value systems proposed—CCA and CCE. Chambers developed and argued the case for CCE. In this essay, the fundamental nature of each system is outlined and related to the economic theory of the firm and its associated theory of optimum resource allocation. It is shown that both CCA and CCE theories are conceptually valid and provide necessary information for efficient resource allocation decisions; however, neither system can provide all the ex post information required and they complement each other.