Publications

  • The Political Economy of Grand Corruption in Public Procurement in the Construction Sector of Hungary

    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 […]

  • Careers, Connections and Corruption Risks in Europe

    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 […]

  • Implementing the EU Public Procurement Directives: Effectiveness of the European Commission and the Court of Justice of the European Union as anticorruption actors

    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 […]

  • Universalistic rules-particularistic implementation: The EU’s single market for government purchases

    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 […]

  • Constructing Public Procurement Databases from Administrative Records

    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. […]

  • From Corruption to State Capture. A New Analytical Framework with Empirical Applications from Hungary

    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 […]

  • D1.2 Database of legal and regulatory norms

    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 […]

  • D2.3 Data Template for information on public procurement tendering and its actors

    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 […]

  • D1.1 Towards a comprehensive mapping of information on public procurement tendering and its actors across Europe

    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 […]

  • Transparency and Open Government: Reporting on the Disclosure of Information

    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. […]