Integrity And Efficiency In Sustainable Public Contracts

Ensuring efficiency and integrity throughout the public procurement cycle is essential to a sound allocation of taxpayers' money. Yet public contracts are plagued by corruption, collusion, favoritism and conflicts of interest. This book addresses these problems from sophisticated, academic, institutional and practical perspectives. The book's ambition is to shape the public debate in the procurement community by highlighting how corruption implies violations of fundamental rights and undermines the fiduciary relationship between citizens and public institutions. The analysis underlines how corruption may stem from - and yet be resolved - through the exercise of discretion in the public procurement system. Focusing on the effects of public corruption and private collusion on procurement integrity, the book marks the features of misconduct and suggests needed counter-measures. The work also emphasizes that the pursuit of efficiency and integrity in public contracts must be rooted in professional skills, and in ethical regulations and training for public officers. The research reflected in these pieces cornes from sources around the world, and offers an excellent foundation for further development of these topics. Expanding on prior research, this volume builds on a more active transnational academic cooperation and exchanges of ideas on integrity in public contracts for the benefit of citizens.

Innovation in public procurement is essential for sustainable and inclusive growth in an increasingly globalized economy. To achieve that potential, both the promises and the perils of innovation must be investigated, including the risks and opportunities of joint procurement across borders in the European Union and the United States. This in-depth research investigates innovation in public procurement from three different perspectives. First, leading academics and practitioners assess the purchase of innovation, with a particular focus on urban public contracting in smart cities involving meta-infrastructures, public-private partnership arrangements and smart contracts. A second line of inquiry looks for ways to encourage innovative suppliers. Here, the collected authors draw on emerging lessons from the US and Europe, to explore both the costs and the benefits of spurring innovation through procurement. A third perspective looks to various innovations in the procurement process itself, with a focus on the effects of joint and cross-border procurement in the EU and US landscapes. The chapters review new technologies and platforms, the increasingly automated means of selecting suppliers, and the related efficiencies that “big data” can bring to public procurement. Expanding on research in the editors’ prior volume, Integrity and Efficiency in Sustainable Public Contracts: Balancing Corruption Concerns in Public Procurement Internationally (Bruylant 2014), this volume builds on a series of academic conferences and exchanges to address these issues from sophisticated academic, institutional and practical perspectives, and to point the way to future research on the contractual models that are emerging from new procurement technologies.

This book evaluates the 2014 EU public procurement law reform from a sustainability perspective.

Contents Anthony De Jasay The Python That Eats Itself By The Tail Sergio Beraldo – Enrico Colombatto – Valerio Filoso – Marco Stimolo Growth in One (Short) Lesson Franklin G. Mixon Jr. The Allocation of Death in the Afghanistan War Remembering James Buchanan Richard E. Wagner – Francesco Forte – Domenico da Empoli Forum on public procurement, quality of expenditure and saving Emma Galli Introduction Sergio Santoro Reference Prices and Standard Costs in Public Procurement as Tools against Corruption Claudio De Rose Corruption in Public Procurement: How to Fight and Prevent It? Mario Lupo Contracts of Public Works: How to Guarantee Low Prices Without Reducing Quality Ilde Rizzo Efficiency and Integrity Issues in Public Procurement Performance Gabriella M. Racca The Risks of Emergencies in Public Procurement Gian Luigi Albano On the Problem of Quality Enforcement in Centralized Public Procurement Symposium Domenico da Empoli On Federalism and Government Size David Hebert – Richard E. Wagner Taxation as a Quasi-Market Process Richard E. Wagner – Akira Yohoyama Polycentrism, Federalism, and Liberty Yong J. Yoon – William F. Shughart II Stackelberg on the Danube River Reviews

The Routledge Handbook of Public Procurement Corruption showcases the most innovative and exciting research being conducted in this important area of study, providing a comprehensive go-to reference for all who are interested in the topic. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the global race for health and ancillary goods amid global supply chain disruptions demonstrated that, when tested, all countries are incredibly vulnerable to fraud and corruption in public procurement, irrespective of their level of development. Yet despite the widespread nature of the problem, there remains a lack of in-depth, analytical, and cross-country investigations into public procurement corruption. This book addresses this gap by providing a comprehensive, multidisciplinary, geographically balanced treatise on corruption in public procurement. It combines country-specific studies to allow readers to easily compare differing perspectives and approaches and overarching thematic chapters to reflect on new and cutting-edge issues in procurement and their implications for procurement corruption. Key sectors such as healthcare and infrastructure are considered, as well as the role of new technologies, in both combatting and enabling procurement corruption. This Handbook provides academics, practitioners, and graduate researchers of public administration, law, and anti-corruption with all of the tools they need to understand the nuances of public procurement corruption around the world.

Public procurement and competition law are both important fields of EU law and policy, intimately intertwined in the creation of the internal market. Hitherto their close connection has been noted, but not closely examined. This work is the most comprehensive attempt to date to explain the many ways in which these fields, often considered independent of one another, interact and overlap in the creation of the internal market. This process of convergence between competition and public procurement law is particularly apparent in the 2014 Directives on public procurement, which consolidate the principle of competition in terms very close to those advanced by the author in the first edition. This second edition builds upon this approach and continues to ask how competition law principles inform and condition public procurement rules, and whether the latter (in their revised form) are adequate to ensure that competition is not distorted. The second edition also deepens the analysis of the market behaviour of the public buyer from a competition perspective. Proceeding through a careful assessment of the general rules of competition and public procurement, the book constantly tests the efficacy of these rules against a standard of the proper functioning of undistorted competition in the market for public procurement. It also traces the increasing relevance of competition considerations in the case law of the Court of Justice of the European Union and sets out criteria and recommendations to continue influencing the development of EU Economic Law.

This report analyses the progress made in implementing the recommendations of the Charbonneau Commission and benchmarks these measures against good practices in OECD countries.

This report applies the 2017 Recommendation of the Council on Public Integrity, assessing: Mexico’s evolving public integrity system; the extent to which new reforms cultivate a culture of integrity across the public sector; and the effectiveness of increasingly stringent accountability mechanisms.