Convergence Without Comparability: Challenges of Implementing IFRS in Emerging Markets

The International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) have become the de facto global language of corporate financial reporting, with the IFRS Foundation reporting complete jurisdictional profiles for 169 jurisdictions as of 2025, the majority of which mandate the Standards for domestic publicly accountable entities. Yet the transplantation of IFRS into emerging markets has produced outcomes markedly different from those observed in the developed-market contexts in which the Standards were substantially developed. This paper argues that IFRS implementation in emerging economies is best understood not as a binary adoption event but as a continuum of convergence strategies — ranging from full adoption (South Africa, Nigeria, Brazil) to selective convergence (India’s Ind AS, China’s Accounting Standards for Business Enterprises)—shaped by institutional capacity, enforcement infrastructure, and the fair-value orientation of the Standards themselves. The paper identifies four recurring implementation challenges—inadequate valuation and audit infrastructure, weak enforcement mechanisms, high retraining costs, and tension between principles-based and rules-based traditions — and concludes that convergence, rather than full adoption, may represent a more institutionally realistic pathway for many emerging economies.