Accounting and social health: a systematic literature review and agenda for future research
这篇综述梳理了2013至2023年间62篇关于社会健康会计的研究，发现现有文献多关注社会健康披露，但很少解释健康问题对企业财务的影响，并指出了研究设计上的不足，为政策制定者和研究者提供了未来方向。
Purpose The objective of this paper is to synthesize and extend the existing understanding of social health accounting (SHA) literature within the perspectives of social health disclosures (SHAD) and the effect of social health problems on public and private sector accounting. Design/methodology/approach This study provides a comprehensive and up-to-date systematic literature review (SLR) of past studies on social health within the accounting literature. This is done by employing a three-step SLR research design to investigate a sample of papers, made up of 62 mixed, qualitative and quantitative studies conducted in over 23 countries, drawn predominantly from the extant accounting literature from 2013 to 2023 and published in 25 peer-reviewed journals. Findings Our SLR offers several findings. First, we find that existing SHA studies apply theories in SHAD studies, but hardly apply them to explain the impact of health problems on business outcomes. Second, we show that the extant studies have focused predominantly on rigorous empirical studies on SHAD, while this is scarce for studies examining the impact of diseases/health problems on both public and private sector accounting. Third, we identify several research design weaknesses, including a lack of primary data analysis, mixed-methods approach and rigorous qualitative studies. Finally, we present directions for future SHA research. Originality/value In contrast to the ever-increasing general social and environmental accounting (SEA) research, existing studies examining global health issues and challenges (e.g. diseases, epidemics and pandemics), especially from an accounting perspective are rare. Nonetheless, the past decade has witnessed a steady increase in research on corporate accounting for, and reporting of, health issues; although the emerging literature remains fragmented thereby impeding the generation of useful empirical and theoretical insights for policymakers, practitioners and researchers. Consequently, this paper offers extensive and timely SLR of the existing studies on SHA; critically reviewing past findings published in a wide range of peer-reviewed international journals that discuss the current state of global SHA research, their weaknesses and set future research agenda.