This Public Procurement Brief presents two new EU public procurement Directives (2014/24/EU and 2014/25/EU) on procurement by public and utilities sectors. The Directives are part of a recently adopted EU legislative package reforming the EU public procurement rules. The Brief provides an...

The public procurement Directives only apply if a body is a contracting authority (contracting entity in the Utilities sector) within the definition of the Directives. SIGMA Brief 3 gives guidance on the notion of a contracting authority/entity under the directives (especially the concept of...

Public authorities are major consumers in Europe: they spend approximately 2 trillion euros annually. By using their purchasing power to choose goods and services with lower impacts on the environment, they can make an important contribution to sustainable consumption and production....

SIGMA Brief 29 gives a short overview of the issue of common errors in public procurement. For the purposes of the Brief, errors are understood as infringements of public procurement rules and principles, regardless of the stage of the procedure. The Brief analyses the types of errors and their...

Fiscal rules are being increasingly used by both emerging and developed economies. This paper analyzes two alternative fiscal policy rules in terms of their impact on debt sustainability: a rule that fixes the ratio of primary surplus to GDP (""fixed surplus rule"") and one that sets the primary...

Government spending plays a critical role in protecting and enforcing rights and civil liberties. Empirical evidence for a sample of industrial and developing countries shows that government expenditures on defense, law and order, social security, education, and health care are associated with...

This paper develops and tests two efficiency wage models of corruption in the civil service. Under fair wage models, civil service wages are an important determinant of corruption. Under shirking models, the level of wages is of secondary importance, as potential bribes dwarf wage income. The...

The paper presents a DGE model designed as a core projection tool to support monetary policy in inflation-targeting (IT) emerging market economies. The paper uses a particularly simple and flexible general equilibrium model structure that can be amended to account for various phenomena that...

Banks will want to influence the bank regulator to favor their interests, and they typically have the means to do so. It is shown that such ""regulatory capture"" in banking does not imply ineffectual regulation; a ""captured"" regulator may impose very tight, costly prudential requirements to...

A central bank must decide on the frequency with which it will conduct open market operations and the variability in short-term money market that it will allow. It is shown how the optimal operating procedure balances the value of attaining an immediate target and broadcasting the central...