Suchergebnisse

Knowledge intensive business services (KIBS) are special in that they rely on knowledge exchange between service providers and consumers and thus intensive cooperation between the two parties is essential at all stages. This implies approaches to find the "right" provider may have to differ from those used in the sector of more homogeneous services and goods. Public procurement regulation aims to improve competitiveness, yet does this help achieving the best value for money in the procurement of KIBS? Legislative constraints on the types of admissible public procurement mechanisms may have an undesirable effect on the provider selection, meaning that services may not be purchased from the most efficient or the most suitable provider. As a benchmark, private consumers are unconstrained in their choice of KIBS providers. We exploit this difference to study the efficiency of KIBS purchases by the public sector, as compared to that in the private sector. Using the 2007 and 2011 waves of a unique survey of KIBS consumers in Russia, we find, inter alia, that the public sector reports lower satisfaction from KIBS and admits a lower level of co-production than the private sector. Our main recommendations refer to the optimal choice of public procurement methods.

Governments promote pro-environmental behavior explicitly, through regulatory provisions, or implicitly, by setting general environmental objectives without explicit requirements. Shared values and commitment to government objectives supposedly help towards greener behavior. We argue that the lack of explicit guidance counteracts, especially if green options are perceived as conflicting with strict regulatory requirements on other issues. In Russian public procurement, organizations are subject to either a rigid procurement law, or a flexible law, or both; neither law formalizes environmental priorities or approaches. We design a survey on practices of green procurement, collecting 223 responses from the whole range of organizations subject to public procurement regulation. Results from probit regressions, robustified on further 800 responses from an additional survey and 250,000 official procurement records, show that regulatory rigidity hinders green practices. Federal authorities are more likely to apply environmental criteria than local governments, but this is rather due to the expertise of their staff than to their commitment to governmental objectives. Publicly funded institutions are less likely to adopt green procurement than state corporations. Caution and avoidance of unintended contraventions seem to impede adoption of green procurement. Provision of information, guidance and improved expertise can help overcome this effect.