Research and Policy Papers
Learn about the state-of-the-art of public procurement and government accountability
A broad set of academic and policy papers looking into public procurement and government accountability across the globe.
- Jan Hrubý, Tomáš Pošepný, Jakub Krafka, Bence Toth, Jiří SkuhrovecThis document is a final methodological paper of WP2 of the DIGIWHIST project. It describes how the final database (DB henceforth) was developed starting with a high level description of each public procurement source that was processed, continuing with a description of the processes that led to the development of a structured database, followed by the processes involved in [...]
- Jiří Skuhrovec, Michal Říha, Miroslav PalanskýThis paper describes the methodology and current output of the data validation process led by Datlab. The purpose of the process has been to check various properties of DIGIWHIST data on public procurement and provide continuous feedback to project partners. Thus the paper will: Describe the validation methodology Provide an overview of the work done Summarize the current [...]
- Geraldine EndrizziThe deliverable D5.4 presents the final EU dissemination conference in Brussels and the further international presence of DIGIWHIST researchers at events such as conferences, workshops, panel discussions and other formats throughout the project.
- Aram KhaghaghordyanThe deliverable D6.1 presents the Memorandum of Understanding on the Sustainability of the EU Horizon 2020 DIGIWHIST project (MoU). In the framework of the Horizon 2020 Research Programme a consortium of six partner organizations that signed this MoU worked on the DIGIWHIST project (full title: “The Digital Whistleblower. Fiscal Transparency, Risk Assessment and Impact of Good Governance [...]
- Aram KhaghaghordyanThe deliverable D6.2 presents the Memorandum of Understanding on the Establishment of the DIGIWHIST Network on Public Procurement (MoU). “Concerned about the seriousness of threats posed by corruption in the public procurement sector to the stability and security of societies Being aware that preventing and combating corruption in the area of public procurement can be substantially [...]
- Francesco Calderoni, Martina Rotondi, Riccardo Milani, Marina Mancuso and Ernesto U. SavonaThe national workshops are part of the dissemination plan of the project Digiwhist. The workshops have been organised to disseminate the results, including the Digiwhist digital products, to the relevant stakeholders, namely EuroPAM Opentender MET This deliverable D5.3 describes the scope and objectives of the workshops and includes the slides used during the workshops.
- Francesco Calderoni, Riccardo Milani, Martina Rotondi, Carlotta Carbone, Ernesto Savona, Michele Riccardi, Marina MancusoMonitoring European Tenders – MET (https://monitoringeutenders.eu) – is a risk assessment software for public authorities to assess the degree of integrity of European public procurement procedures. MET is based on data collected from the Tenders Electronic Daily (TED) for the period 2009-2017 and on the risk indicators developed by the project DIGIWHIST. The aim of [...]
- Aram Khaghaghordyan, Victoria Dykes, Geraldine EndrizziDeliverable 4.3 “European transparency legislation observatory” or European Public Accountability Mechanisms (EuroPAM) is a website (http://europam.eu/) that presents the results of. D1.2 “Database of legal and regulatory norms” that was submitted by the Hertie School of Governance in the end of February 2016. EuroPAM is a database of legal and regulatory norms for 34 European [...]
- DigiwhistOn 29 January 2018 our DIGIWHIST Project Final Conference took place at the European Parliament (Altiero Spinelli building) in Brussels. For everyone who missed the event or who wants to re-listen to the presentations and discussions here are the recordings of the event and the downloadable presentation slides of the respective conference speakers. Part 1 [...]
- Mihály FazekasThis document has been prepared for the European Commission as part of a series of short papers on regional research and indicators produced by the Directorate-General for Regional Policy (WP 12/2017) Summary Based on previous DIGIWHIST research, we use a unique database of the EU-wide Tenders Electronic Daily (TED) which describes public procurement activities across the whole EU-28 between 2006-2015, [...]
- Mihály Fazekas, Bence TóthWinners of the U4 Proxy Challenge 2016 We need more imaginative ways of addressing corruption. It is important to generate indicators that development agencies can use. U4 and DFID developed a proxy challenge competition to inspire the research community to develop reliable, intuitive, accessible and cost-effective assessment methods that are useful across country-contexts. The abuse [...]
- Mihály Fazekas, Bence Toth, Jiri SkuhrovecDeliverable D3.6 builds closely on the indicator definitions reached in WP3 and database created in WP2. Indicator implementation has been done as part of WP2 and the indicators are directly part of the database being submitted in D2.6. Furthermore, the precise technical details of each indicator are incorporated in the methods paper (D2.8). We decided [...]
- Jan Hrubý, Tomáš Pošepný, Jakub Krafka, Tomáš Mrázek, Marek Mikeš, Michal Říha, Jiří SkuhrovecThe purpose of deliverable D2.6 is to publish source codes of the whole DIGIWHIST data processing system and final DIGIWHIST database which is the result of processing: ● 25 public procurement data sources ○ TED + TED archive ○ Current procurement portal + archive for CZ, UK, HU ○ One source for SK, PL, ES, [...]
- Luciana Cingolani, Mihály FazekasIn spite of the many efforts in the pursuit of a European single market, many barriers continue to lie ahead, as the field of public procurement illustrates. In 2015, around 40% of all high-value procurement tenders in a large pool of European countries attracted only 2 bidders or less, and only 3% of all winning [...]
- Monika Bauhr, Agnes Czibik, Mihaly Fazekas, Jenny de Fine LichtTransparency is widely promoted as an essential condition for good governance, and as an effective tool against public sector corruption more specifically. Although the empirical evidence on the impact of transparency on corruption is growing, empirical evidence remains mixed. Recent critique holds that a main reason for the lack of robust empirical evidence is that [...]
- Mihály Fazekas, Gábor KocsisMeasuring high-level corruption is subject to extensive scholarly and policy interest, which has achieved moderate progress in the last decade. This article develops two objective proxy measures of high-level corruption in public procurement: single bidding in competitive markets and a composite score of tendering ‘red flags’. Using official government data on 2.8 million contracts in [...]
- Mihály FazekasAbstract Red tape has long been identified as a major cause of corruption, hence deregulation was advocated as an effective anticorruption tool, an advice which many country followed. However, we lack robust systematic evidence on whether deregulation actually lowers corruption. This is partially due to the difficulty of defining what is good regulation, but also [...]
- Jan Hrubý, Tomáš Pošepný, Jakub Krafka, Tomáš Mrázek, Marek Mikeš and Jiří SkuhrovecThe collection of public procurement related raw data is about understanding source systems, what data they offer and how the data can be obtained from a source (more details in our publication on raw data); to create a structured database we need to understand the data itself and store it according to a data template that [...]
- Mihály Fazekas, Mara MendesApproximately 15% of the EU’s Gross Domestic Product is spent every year on procuring goods and services, and some estimates indicate that corruption increases the cost of government contracts by 20 – 25%. It is even more worrying that corruption in public procurement compromises widely supported public goals, such as building safe highways, high quality [...]
- Mihály Fazekas, Mara MendesBased on our current DIGIWHIST research, Mara Mendes (Open Knowledge Foundation Germany) and Mihály Fazekas (University of Cambridge) have created a catalogue of nine recommendations for governments on how to best publish procurement data. Providing comprehensive public procurement information free of charge in an easy-to-use format to all interested parties is expected to increase market [...]
- Mihály Fazekas, Bence TóthIn recent years, the abuse of diverse corporate networks for extracting corrupt rents and channelling them to opaque destinations have come to the forefront of international anticorruption efforts. This was marked by the UK anti-corruption summit’s focus on beneficial ownership which built on initiatives against opaque companies by OECD or FATF to name a few. [...]
- Elizabeth Dávid-Barrett, Mihály FazekasFor politicians seeking to use a clientelist approach to achieve political and private gain, i.e., to prolong their hold on power and maximize personal profit, control of government contracting is a key tool. We theorise that politicians wishing to exploit government contracting for such ends will seek to increase their influence over three stages of [...]
- Mihály Fazekas, István János TóthIt is theoretically ambiguous and empirically contested whether EU Funds contribute to lower corruption and better governance or the opposite. Many recipient countries benefit to a substantial degree with allocations amounting to 2-4% of their annual GDP. A range of positive and negative cases has been uncovered by the European Commission, national governments and the [...]
- Mihály Fazekas, István János Tóth, Lawrence Peter KingIn order to address the lack of reliable indicators of corruption, this article develops a composite indicator of high-level institutionalised corruption through a novel ‘Big Data’ approach. Using publicly available electronic public procurement records in Hungary, we identify “red flags” in the public procurement process and link them to restricted competition and recurrent contract award [...]
- Nicholas Charron, Carl Dahlström, Victor Lapuente, Mihaly FazekasWhy do officials in some countries favor entrenched contractors, while others assign public contracts more impartially? This article emphasizes the important interplay between politics and bureaucracy. It suggests that corruption risks are lower when bureaucrats’ careers do not depend on political connections but on their peers. We test this hypothesis with a novel measure of [...]
- Mihály Fazekas , Luciana Cingolani, Bence TóthCorruption is ostensibly difficult to measure, especially when it is unclear which form of corruption is captured, which part of the corrupt deal is visible in the data, and how different proxies relate to each other. Due to the emergence of innovations in measuring corruption in public procurement, this paper can provide a comprehensive review of quantitative corruption proxies, [...]
- Mihály Fazekas , Luciana CingolaniThere are widespread perceptions and countless documented cases of tight-knit networks of politicians and businessmen colluding for allocating public procurement contracts in return for political party donations. In the absence of systematic evidence, neither the magnitude of the problem nor the effectiveness of policies curbing such corruption is well-understood. In order to advance our understanding [...]
- Jan Hrubý, Mihály Fazekas, Tomáš Pošepný, Jakub Krafka, Michal Říha, Marek Mikeš, Tomáš MrázekThis is a DIGIWHIST project deliverable with the main goal of obtaining unstructured and semi-structured data from a pool of 100+ potentially relevant datasources where further data processing is assessed to be plausible. In order to determine the right strategy for data scraping, this also requires analysis of the architecture and structure of online data [...]
- Juan M. Tirado, Ovidiu Serban, Qiang Guo, Eiko YonekiA constantly growing amount of information is available through the web. Unfortunately, extracting useful content from this massive amount of data still remains an open issue. The lack of standard data models and structures forces developers to create adhoc solutions from the scratch. The figure of the expert is still needed in many situations where developers do not have [...]
- Mihály Fazekas, Péter András Lukács, István János TóthPrivate 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 [...]
- Nicholas Charron, Carl Dahlström, Mihály Fazekas, Victor LapuenteWhy 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 [...]
- Mihály Fazekas, Alejandro Ferrando GamirThis 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 [...]
- Mihály Fazekas, Jiri SkuhrovecOpen 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 [...]
- Ágnes Czibik, Mihály Fazekas, Bence Tóth 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. [...]
- Mihály Fazekas, István János TóthState 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 [...]
- Stephanie E. Trapnell, Aram Khaghaghordyan, Mihály FazekasEuropean 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 [...]
- Ágnes Czibik, Bence Tóth, István János TóthThis 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 [...]
- Luciana Cingolani, Mihály Fazekas, Roberto Martinez Barranco Kukutschka, Bence TóthThis 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 [...]
- Victoria L. Lemieux, Stephanie E. Trapnell, Jessie Worker, Carole ExcellThis 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. [...]
- Alina Mungiu-PippidiWhy do some societies manage to control corruption so that it manifests itself only occasionally, while other societies remain systemically corrupt? This book is about how societies reach that point when integrity becomes the norm and corruption the exception in regard to how public affairs are run and public resources are allocated. It primarily asks [...]
- Mihály Fazekas, Gábor KocsisMeasuring high-level corruption is subject to extensive scholarly and policy interest, which has achieved moderate progress in the last decade. This article develops two objective proxy measures of high-level corruption in public procurement: single bidding in competitive markets and a composite score of tendering ‘red flags’. Using official government data on 2.8 million contracts in [...]
- Aram Khaghaghordyan, Anna FrenyoThe overall aim of the website www.digiwhist.eu is to represent the DIGIWHIST project as a static webpage and provide internal and external links to important public procurement resources. It provides basic description of the project including information on partners, key researchers, project timeline and news. It also serves as a place for releasing publications and [...]
- Savona, Ernesto U.Using the script approach, this paper analyses the different stages that characterise the infiltration of organised crime groups in the public construction industry. Three different Italian local contexts with a high presence of organised crime groups (Sicily, Calabria and Campania) are considered. Case studies based on data provided to the author by local judicial authorities [...]
- Caneppele, Stefano, Francesco Calderoni, and Sara MartocchiaThe paper aims at expanding knowledge on the presence of organized criminal groups in public contract procurement in the south of Italy. It seeks to highlight how the capabilities of law enforcement agencies could be enhanced by means of criminological models. The paper sets out a criminological model with which to assess the general and [...]
- Calderoni, Francesco, and Stefano CaneppeleThis book presents the first study ever made so far on the risk of infiltration of organized crime in public procurement in Southern Italy. Despite numerous alarms, the problem of infiltration in the procurement was for many years neglected in research. On the contrary, the mafias’ interest on procurement grew, aiming at profig and maintenance [...]
- OECDBribery in Public Procurement: methods, actors and counter-measures sets out the issues in a simple format. Part I of the report examines procurement rules, procedures and practices, and highlights risks in the tendering process. It goes on to look at how size of contracts can affect public procurement bribery, and focuses on individual sectors at [...]
- OECDGovernments and state-owned enterprises purchase a wide variety of goods, services and public works from the private sector, from basic computer equipment to the construction of roads. Public procurement is a key economic activity of governments that represents a significant percentage of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) generating huge financial flows, estimated on average at [...]
- Dimitri, N., Piga, G., & Spagnolo, G.How can organizations ensure that they can get best value for money in their procurement decisions? How can they stimulate innovations from their dedicated suppliers? With contributions from leading academics and professionals, this 2006 handbook offers expert guidance on the fundamental aspects of successful procurement design and management in firms, public administrations, and international institutions.
- Tina SøreideAbstract: The report provides an introduction to the international debate and experiences with procurement-related corruption, as well as recommendations on anti-corruption measures to be implemented in procurement procedures.
- Bandiera, Oriana, Andrea Prat, and Tommaso VallettiAbstract: We propose a distinction between active and passive waste as determinants of the cost of public services. Active waste entails utility for the public decision maker, whereas passive waste does not. We analyse purchases of standardised goods by Italian public bodies and exploit a policy experiment associated with a national procurement agency.
- Grødeland, Å. B., & Aasland, A.Abstract: Anti-corruption efforts in Europe’s post-communist states have been less successful than anticipated. Criticism has been raised against the role of the international community in promoting anti-corruption programmes. Besides, such programmes have been deemed vague and “all-inclusive”. They have largely failed to address local factors “informing” corrupt behaviour in post-communist states, such as (a) negative [...]
- Büchner, S., Freytag, A., González, L. G., & Güth, WAbstract: A procurement contract is granted by a bureaucrat (the auctioneer) who is interested in a low price and a bribe from the provider. The optimal bids and bribes are derived based on an iid private cost assumption. In the experiment, bribes are negatively framed (betweensubjects treatment) to capture that society is better off if [...]
- Goldman, Eitan, Jörg Rocholl, and Jongil SoAbstract This article analyses whether political connections of the board of directors of publicly traded companies in the USA affect the allocation of government procurement contracts.
- Coviello, Decio, and Mario MarinielloAbstract: We document whether and how publicizing a public procurement auction causally affects entry and the costs of procurement. We run a regression discontinuity design analysis on a large database of Italian procurement auctions. Auctions with a value above the threshold must be publicized in the Regional Official Gazette and two provincial newspapers.
- Aram Khaghaghordyan and Anna Frenyo. Author: Vanessa Enriquez
- Jan HrubyA central task of DIGIWHIST is to collect publicly available data about public procurement across Europe. The collection of such data and other complementary datasets is the main goal of WP2. This document is a data management plan that describes, in compliance with the guidelines on H2020 FAIR Data Management, how data will be collected, [...]
