Search results

Regulation and control of public procurement constitute a crucial field for the application of governance ideals and practices. This study explores the public procurement reform process in Turkey with reference to the implementation of governance as part of an ongoing neoliberal discourse and practice. Turkey's public procurement system was reformed in 2002 in line with governance principles of transparency, anti-corruption, securing competition and by establishing an independent regulatory institution. A decade after this reform, our analysis shows that political will, economic forces in the procurement market and problems in the institutional-organizational setting are factors that play a role in the relapses from governance ideals and practices. Points for practitioners Reforms aimed at achieving good governance in public procurements are hard to sustain. The specific institutional traditions of local contexts, interventions of political authorities and powerful economic interests play an important role in the success of reforms. Persistent ad hoc modifications of public procurement laws erode the regulatory scope, change the composition and political autonomy of board membership, and undermine the principles of transparency, accountability and competitiveness. There is a need to actively ensure sustainability of governance principles through strong defense mechanisms which should be institutionalized within local social dynamics.

Public procurement is an important element of Polish market economy. Poland, upon its accession to the European Union, like other member states, set legal frameworks of public procurement and pointed to the mechanisms which aim to stimulate the development and protection of the competition and obey basic rules of union market functioning. In order to realize these aims, transparent and non-discriminating rules of awarding public contracts, the control system, supervision and sanctions were established. They contributed to decrease in corruption and undue use of authority of state administration.

Despite the importance of the public procurement market, little effort has been made to systematically and consistently collect reliable statistics on a number of critical dimensions. To date, no attempt has been made to collect comparable statistics on the size of public procurement in economies around the world. While data are publicly available for High-income economies, for the rest of the world, data and studies are scarce. However, public procurement is as important in developing countries as it is in advanced economies. Governments in developing countries are significant purchasers of good and services, and these markets represent huge opportunities to enhance competition and development. Low-income countries have the highest share of publicprocurement in their economies, at 14.5 percent of GDP, followed by upper-middle income countries, at 13.6 percent, as data from government sources or international development institutions indicate. International statistics fall short in systematically and comparably capturing a number of other important dimensions of public procurement, including the regulatory and legal environment, risks and costs, quality and efficiency of service delivery, transparency and competition.

Regulation and control of public procurement constitute a crucial field for the application of governance ideals and practices. This study explores the public procurement reform process in Turkey with reference to the implementation of governance as part of an ongoing neoliberal discourse and practice. Turkey's public procurement system was reformed in 2002 in line with governance principles of transparency, anti-corruption, securing competition and by establishing an independent regulatory institution. A decade after this reform, our analysis shows that political will, economic forces in the procurement market and problems in the institutional-organizational setting are factors that play a role in the relapses from governance ideals and practices.Points for practitionersReforms aimed at achieving good governance in public procurements are hard to sustain. The specific institutional traditions of local contexts, interventions of political authorities and powerful economic interests play an important role in the success of reforms. Persistent ad hoc modifications of public procurement laws erode the regulatory scope, change the composition and political autonomy of board membership, and undermine the principles of transparency, accountability and competitiveness. There is a need to actively ensure sustainability of governance principles through strong defense mechanisms which should be institutionalized within local social dynamics.

Benchmarking Public Procurement 2016 Report aims to develop actionable indicators which will help countries identify and monitor policies and regulations that impact how private sector companies do business with the government. The project builds on the Doing Business methodology and was initiated at the request of the G20 Anti-Corruption Working Group.

Policy-makers in the European Union (EU) have increasingly emphasised public procurement as an instrument that can be used to stimulate innovation. These developments reflect and respond to a growing concern among EU member states and regions about how to maintain competitive advantage in an economic environment increasingly subject to global competition The Lisbon goals set for the EU in 2000 require it to become the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world by 2010. In order to realize this ambition, the European Commission (EC) has urged EU member states to consider "encouraging public procurement of innovative products and services". The EC has also recommended that, in order to create an innovative Europe, public procurement should be used to "drive demand for innovative goods, while at the same time improving the level of public services". In line with this policy orientation, a recent high level policy report has put forward explicit arguments in favour of "using public procurement to encourage innovation by providing a 'lead market' for new technologies". Generally, the research literature concurs with policy-makers' claims that public procurement can be a useful instrument for stimulating innovation. The public sector can "play an important role as a stabilising and stimulating pacer in a situation where the private sector is confronted with extremely unstable environments". In order to stimulate private sector innovation by creating demand, a public agency can perform direct procurement (buying something to fulfil intrinsic need), acting as a proxy customer (e.g. by creating standards) or as a linkage creator between suppliers and users. The purpose of this thesis is to develop an innovation theory-based approach to innovation policy regarding public procurement of innovations, by elaborating an institutional focus via research on innovation policy formulation as institutional design complemented by research on institutional determinants of innovation performance. Thus, the purpose is to explore and describe institutional aspects of policies for public procurement of innovations, with an emphasis on institutions as both outcomes of policy making and input factors affecting the success or failure of policy implementation. By relating an institutional perspective on public procurement of innovations to both the design of policy and its impact on innovation performance, it would become possible to describe and analyse processes involving public procurement of innovations in a better way, and thereby to derive implications for both researchers and practitioners. The empirical studies appended to this thesis demonstrate that institutions matter, i.e. that the behaviour and outcome of public procurement of innovations are affected by institutions.

For the execution of policies, as well as for its own operations, governments procure goods and services, ranging from paper and pencils to fighter planes, cleaning services and public road works. In the European Union public procurement represents 16% of the gross domestic product. The Dutch national government alone annually spends 10 billion euro on procurement. Governments are increasingly using their authority as a large buyer in the market to compel private organisations to contribute to the achievement of their public objectives (Rolfstam, 2009). Public procurement has thus become a policy instrument to reach societal outcomes. In this research a specific example of how the Dutch national government is trying to achieve an ou