Two issues stand out in this conversation. The first concerns the unfinished business of the global fight against the scourge of poverty, which impacts one region more than most: Africa. At the same time, a key pre-requisite for economic performance - affordable and efficient public...

A number of countries used discriminatory government procurement policies as part of stimulus packages designed to alleviate the effects of the global economic crisis. This paper collates and updates the evidence related to the size of procurement markets, the level of home bias they exhibit,...

Transitioning from the post-2008 financial meltdown to a sustained period of global growth and prosperity involves a major challenge: how to ensure the effective management of international economic interdependence. Trade, growth, good governance and sustainable development constitute essential...

Against a backdrop of sharply rising inequality, the Tokyo Round of the GATT resulted in a 1.6 percentage point reduction in average US tariffs – larger than CUS-FTA, NAFTA, and the liberalization accompanying the granting of PNTR to China. We construct a novel IV based on the so-called...

This paper develops a taxonomy of government procurement (GP) measures to provide a basis for further analysis. It aims to undertake a more comprehensive, albeit not exhaustive, collection of GP barriers across countries, and to develop a classification system of GP measures to facilitate...

The OECD developed a taxonomy of measures affecting government procurement which provides a classification system for different GP measures, policies and procedures, which can impact cross-border government procurement. This project aims to further assist countries in assessing their procurement...

To date, government procurement has been effectively carved out of the main multilateral rules of the WTO system. This paper examines the systemic and other ramifications of this exclusion, from both an economic and a legal point of view. In addition to relevant elements of the WTO Agreements,...

The WTO Agreement on Government Procurement (GPA) is a plurilateral Agreement, meaning that it comprises only a subset of the full Membership of the WTO. Currently, a number of WTO Members that are not Parties to the Agreement either are actively seeking accession to it, have commitments to...

Until recently, government procurement bidding processes have generally favored domestic firms by awarding the contract to a domestic firm even if a foreign firm tenders a lower bid, so long as the difference between the two is sufficiently small. This has been replaced by an agreement...