Evidence on Public Procurement from Firm-Level Surveys : Global Statistics from the World Bank Enterprise Surveys and a Novel Public Procurement Survey Module

Public procurement is at the intersection between the public and the private sectors. Policy makers and practitioners are increasingly paying attention to the potential catalytic role of public procurement to promote economic growth and inclusive and sustainable development, for example through participation of SMEs and women-owned firms in this market. However, despite a growing academic literature, there is still limited evidence on the link between public procurement and firms, which this paper contributes to address in two ways. First, this paper provides guidance on how to design a high-quality firm-level survey to study public procurement from the perspective of firms. Second, this paper presents some of the statistics and stylized facts that can be generated on public procurement from the existing World Bank Enterprise Surveys data, covering more than 150 countries worldwide. To sustain evidence-based policies in public procurement, firm-level survey data can be a valuable source of information on public procurement market. In particular, it can capture dimensions such as views and perceptions of firms that cannot be observed from e-government procurement data, it allows to study firms that never entered the public procurement market, and it provides data for countries that have not adopted an eGP system yet. Together with legislative and institutional reviews, and the analysis of transactional procurement data, firm-level survey data can be used to identify weaknesses of a public procurement system and inform reform efforts. This paper is part of a broader effort to continuously expand the available data, statistics, and tools for evidence-based policy making in public procurement