There are widespread perceptions and countless documented cases of tight-knit networks of politicians and businessmen colluding for allocating public procurement contracts in return for political party donations. In the absence of systematic evidence, neither the magnitude of the problem nor the...

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...