This brief piece applauds the Government Accountability Office (GAO) for adding the management of interagency contracting to its High Risk List. It suggests that interagency acquisition, the poster child for the flexible, streamlined, businesslike approach of the 1990's acquisition reform...

This paper discusses the main approaches to the regulation of outsourcing to date, taking in particular the perspective of incomplete and relational contracts. The paper is the foundation of a larger project on the reorientation of outsourcing and its regulation in the light of recent...

This paper provides a critical assessment of the Feasibility study concerning the actual implementation of a joint cross-border procurement procedure by public buyers from different Member States prepared by BBG-SKI for the European Commission. The paper submits that the study provides some...

In recent years, the call for transparency in pharmaceutical pricing has gained momentum among policymakers and stakeholders. Following a resolution of the 72nd World Health Assembly and the establishment of the Oslo Medicines Initiative, there has been a concerted push for greater transparency...

The Directive 2014/24/EU on Public Procurement (“the Directive 2014/24), the Directive 2014/25/EU on Utilities, and the European Commission have as one of their aims the impulse of aggregation of public purchases by means of central purchasing bodies and other aggregated procurement...

One of the more common rules in federal government procurement is that the Government may describe its needs to the private sector by specifying a “brand name” product, as long as the Government adds the words “or equal” to the brand name and articulates the product’s salient physical,...

The controversial 'Buy American requirements in Section 1605 of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 threaten to stir protectionism leading to an outright trade war. This could be catastrophic in the current economic crisis, particularly since the Obama administration does not...

This short piece, which supplements the discussion from February 2020 (also on SSRN) discusses the Department of Defense (DoD) post-award debriefing of the disappointed offeror (Amazon) following the award (to Microsoft) of the $10 billion, $10-year Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI)...

This Article discusses the Federal Circuit's 2010 government contracts cases. It begins with some perspective on, and empirical quantification of, the Federal Circuit’s level of specialization and evolving jurisprudence in the field of government contracts. It eventually turns to analysis of a...

This paper has adopted the exploratory case study method of analyzing a few recent cases of public procurement irregularities on Indian Railways documented by the vigilance departments and the CAG available in public domain to inquire into the following issues: (a) how do irregularities and...