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 EU procurement directives stipulate that public contracts are awarded to the lowest bidder or to the bidder with the economically most advantageous offer; the latter requiring that a scoring rule must be specified. We provide a simple theoretical framework for tender evaluation and discuss...

Aggregation of public demand may have positive effects on the demand for green and socially conscious goods. The exemplary role of procuring entities in fostering sustainable procurement is automatically accentuated by the mass of aggregated procurement. The economies of scale possible through...

Public procurement is officially regarded as an effective means to secure environmental improvement. Estimates by the European Commission indicate that public authorities within the European Union typically purchase goods and services corresponding to approximately 16 percent of GNP per annum....

This study empirically investigates the impact of public procurement regulation quality on the competition for tenders and the cost-effectiveness of awarded contracts, by employing the World Bank's Benchmarking Public Procurement and EuroPAM Public Procurement quality scores. Using extensive...

Research on government e-procurement suggests the existence of price savings ranging from 5% to 20% of the total value of public purchases, which also account for a significant part of GDP. Nevertheless, there is no clear view about the consequences of that saved money. This paper points out,...

Government procurement is perhaps one of the most under-explored areas in the recent academic literature on transatlantic economic relations and yet it is also one of the most protected economic sectors addressed in the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) negotiations. Even...

This paper empirically investigates the impact of public procurement regulation quality on competition and cost-effectiveness. I employ the World Bank's Benchmarking Public Procurement quality scores. Using extensive data about public procurement in the European Economic Area, Switzerland, and...

Public procurement cost evaluation is important both for procurement optimization at the company level and for evaluating the public procurement regulatory system. This paper presents a survey-based methodological approach to public procurement cost evaluation at the macro level. Our approach is...

We provide novel stylized facts about competition, bidding, entry and bidders across a wide spectrum of public procurement auctions using comprehensive and rich Finnish data. Competition for publicly procured contracts is relatively low with a median bidder count of two (three conditional on...