The future of public sector accounting education: A structured literature review

Public sector accounting education (PSAE) has recently attracted increasing attention from both scholars and practitioners. Nonetheless, there is still an education/practice gap that undermines public servants’ ability to face the complexity of the current working environment. This paper reviews and critiques the PSAE literature, identifies the main practical issues affecting the field, and outlines how education providers can improve formal and non-formal curricula and training. Results reveal that the exploratory nature of a large part of the PSAE research and the lack of a practical perspective able to bridge the gap between PSAE and the requirements in practice of the current public sector context demonstrate the pressing need to develop the topic and how it is investigated. The present review is one of the first attempts to investigate PSAE with a focus on the practical approaches that could be used for the development of graduates and public servants’ accounting competencies.