Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to review and analyze the literature on consolidated financial statements (CFS) in the public sector published from 1980 to 2015 in public sector accounting and management journals, and propose a future research agenda.

Design/methodology/approach

Adopting a structured literature review methodology, the authors investigate how the CFS literature is developing and what its focus is.

Findings

The authors identify five major topics: the definition of the consolidation area; the identification of the reporting entity; the private vs public sector accounting standard dichotomy; the relationship with the statistical rules; and the usefulness of CFS.

Originality/value

The authors analyze these topics, highlighting the growing implementation of CFS in different contexts (mainly focusing on governments outside the USA) and provide suggestions for future research.