This paper explores three of the challenges that public buyers face when designing public tenders to support the delivery of smart urban mobility initiatives and when supervising the execution of the relevant contracts. First, the paper covers emerging issues around access and reuse of transport...

Innovation in digital technologies is triggering a variety of regulatory and policy responses by the EU. Fostering innovation is at the core of the EU's industrial strategy and public procurement is becoming one of its main tools. The EU has reactivated its efforts to promote (digital)...

This paper looks at public procurement and State aid rules as two examples of areas of EU economic law subjected to interpretative and enforcement difficulties due to the introduction, sometimes veiled, of subjective elements in their main prohibitions. The paper establishes parallels with other...

This piece reflects on the role of public procurement regulation in the face of a situation generating an extremely urgent need for the public sector to buy additional supplies and equipment, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Counterintuitively, at a time of heightened public expenditure, public...

This paper provides a critical assessment of the rules regarding the clarification, supplementation and correction of tenders in procedures for the award of public contracts regulated by the EU 2014 Public Procurement Package. It does so through a detailed assessment of the transposition of...

This paper aims to offer some reflections on the legal relevance of general principles of EU public procurement law after the adoption of the 2014 package of substantive Directives on public procurement. It focusses on the field of concession contracts because one of the explicit justifications...

In this short paper, I reflect on the case study of the procurement of personal protective equipment (PPE) for the English NHS during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. I put forward two main claims. My first claim is that the UK Government not only was particularly ill-positioned to deal...

This paper briefly reviews the need for the Proposed Concessions Directive and the opportunity of the proposal; explores the logic and main aspects of the Proposed Concessions Directive, particularly regarding its more ‘concession-specific' rules on their economic balance; and offers some...

This paper attempts a concise comparison of the rules applicable to the rejection of abnormally low and non-compliant tenders in a number of EU jurisdictions (namely, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Romania, Spain and the United Kingdom). In order to set the common ground for the...

This chapter revisits the interaction between the EU rules on State aid and on public procurement. It probes the standard presumption that compliance with EU procurement rules excludes the existence of State aid because public tenders are apt to replicate market conditions and thus suppress any...