使用EVA来衡量和评估业绩【外文翻译】.doc

本科毕业论文（设计）外 文 翻 译原文：Using EVA to measure performance and assess Of all the measures that corporations use to gauge their performance, none is more accurate or useful than economic value added, or EVA. Used to its fullest, EVA can help corporations achieve remarkable success. In fact, most of the companies using EVA as their framework for financial management and incentive compensation have substantially outperformed their competitors.EVA is the term that Stern Stewart & Co. coined for its particular variety of economic profit, a concept that has been part of mainstream economic thinking for more than a century. Put most simply, EVA is the gain (or loss) that remains after levying a charge against after-tax operating profits for the opportunity cost of all capital—equity as well as debt—used to produce those profits. The calculation of EVA begins with putting operating profits on an economic rather than an accounting basis. That requires the correction of a number of anomalies in GAAP accounting, such as the immediate expensing of investments in research and development. Then the EVA measure deducts a charge for the weighted average cost of all capital. The remainder is the dollar amount by which after-tax operating profits in each period exceed or fall short of the cost of capital.Charging profits for the cost of capital is crucial. As Peter Drucker put the matter in a 1995 Harvard Business Review article: "EVA is based on something we have known for a long time: what we call profits, the money left to service equity, is usually not profit at all. Until a business returns a profit that is greater than its cost of capital, it operates at a loss. Never mind that it pays taxes as if it had a genuine profit. The enterprise still returns less to the economy than it devours in resources.... Until then it does not create wealth; it destroys it."Many corporate managers have forgotten this basic principle because they have been conditioned to focus on conventional accounting profits, which include a deduction for interest payments on debt but have no provision at all for the cost of equity capital. Worse still, most line managers base their decisions on operating profits, which don't even have a charge for debt. True profits don't begin until the cost of capital, like all other costs, has been covered.Why is EVA so powerful? First, because it is the performance measure that is linked most directly, both theoretically and empirically, to a measure called MVA, market value added. MVA is the difference between the market value of an enterprise and the capital contributed by shareholders and lenders. The ultimate objective of every corporation should be to produce as much MVA as possible. No matter what goods or services they produce, all companies share one thing in common: They all are—or should be—in the business of creating wealth. They do that by taking capital from investors and making it more valuable by combining it with labor, raw materials, and other inputs to create things that society values more highly than the cost of all the inputs, including the opportunity cost of capital. Independent researchers, including James L. Grant of the Simmons Graduate School of Business, also have found that EVA tracks MVA better than other measures. Two researchers at the University of Pittsburgh, Kenneth Lehn, a former chief economist at the SEC, and Anil K. Makhija, discovered another interesting fact about EVA and MVA. Specifically, they found that low MVA and EVA numbers more than double the chance that the chief executive officer will be sacked. Among the companies in their study with an MVA above the median, 8.6 percent had fired their CEOs. But among those with MVAs below the median, the CEO sack rate jumped to 20 percent. The results were similar for EVA, with CEO turnover rates of 9 percent when EVA was above the median and 19.3 percent when it was below the median. Significantly, Lehn and Makhija found no relationship between CEO turnover and earnings, return on equity, or return on assets. EVA: The Centerpiece of a Financial Management SystemThe direct link to value is only one of the facets that makes EVA a superior analytical tool for both operating and strategic decisions, revealing far more about the underlying dynamics of a business than any other performance measure. But companies reap the full benefits of EVA only when they use it as the centerpiece of their financial management system and as the deciding factor in all business decisions. Every company has a financial management system, though most are so complicated and confused that they hardly justify use of the word "system."The confusion arises from the fact that most companies employ a numbing array of measures to express financial goals and objectives. Strategic plans may be based on growth in earnings or revenues or market share (though rarely on shareholder wealth itself). Business units may be evaluated by return on i。