Disaggregation of General Price Level Gains and Losses Available to Purchase

This paper provides a new approach for the preparation and interpretation of GPLA statements. Unlike the conventional approach to GPLA statements, the proposed approach is based on disaggregating the effect of inflation overall into the effect on the beginning balance, of either the monetary or the nonmonetary items, and the effect on operations during the year. The proposed approach explains the relationship between historical cost statements and GPLA statements and the relationship between the nonmonetary items approach (Ijiri, 1976) and the monetary items approach to the same statements. More importantly, the proposed approach provides for a better evaluation of management performance for, as explained in the paper, the effect of inflation on operations may provide a partial measure of how well management planned for the impact of inflation during the year.