Private sector companies develop a diverse set of political connections in high and low corruption countries alike. Using political connections to gain advantage when competing for government contracts is a major form of corruption from Denmark to Italy. Recognizing the difficulty of controlling this type of ‘grand’ corruption this chapter sets out to explore the […]
Why do officials in some countries favor entrenched contractors while others assign public contracts more impartially? According to the research, such variation responds to differences in political institutions, economic development and historical preconditions. This paper instead emphasizes the interplay between politics and bureaucracy. It suggests that corruption risks are minimized when the two groups involved […]
This study on “Implementing the EU Public Procurement Directives: Effectiveness of the European Commission and the Court of Justice of the European Union as anticorruption actors” investigates the impact of all relevant European Commission reasoned opinions and Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) judgements on corruption risks in public procurement markets. By using […]
Open and fair access to government contracts has been a long-standing principle in many international trade agreements including the one on the EU’s single public procurement market which is probably the most extensive among them with its long standing common regulatory and enforcement framework. However, the ostensibly low prevalence of cross-border trade in European public […]
This report aims to provide a comprehensive outline of the potential challenges of building a database from publicly available public procurement records and the possible solutions to the identified problems. We use Hungary as an illustrative example as most problems faced in other countries are present there, and so any finding will be widely applicable. […]
State capture and corruption are widespread phenomena across the globe, but their empirical study still lacks sufficient analytical tools. This paper develops a new conceptual and analytical framework for gauging state capture based on microlevel contractual networks in public procurement. To this end, it establishes a novel measure of corruption risk in government contracting focusing […]
European Public Accountability Mechanisms (EuroPAM) is a database of legal and regulatory norms for 34 European countries. EuroPAM is an extension of the Public Accountability Mechanisms Initiative (PAM) of the World Bank, which is a primary data collection effort that produces assessments of in-law and in-practice efforts to enhance the transparency of public administration and […]
This report takes a step further and translates the results of the comprehensive legal mapping of information on public procurement tendering into a data template. This template may be considered a pragmatic and detailed documentation of the dataset that DIGIWHIST aims to retrieve. Part I outlines the database structure that provides DIGIWHIST with a robust […]
This report presents the results of a comprehensive mapping exercise of the scope and quality of public procurement and linked information in 35 European jurisdictions: 28 European Union member states, 6 EU neighbouring countries and the European Commission. Part I analyses the public procurement information hosted in national platforms and made available online for the […]
This paper provides a summary of data about requests, complaints and appeals published by central reporting bodies in eight countries. It examines available data from the most recent year of aggregated data—ranging between 2011 and 2013. It assessed these statistics for Brazil, India, Jordan, Mexico, South Africa, Thailand, The United Kingdom, and the United States. […]