The Politics Of Procurement

In 1993, Canada’s Liberal Party cancelled an order to replace the Sea King maritime helicopter. The Liberals claimed the Tory plan was too expensive, but the cancellation itself actually cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars. The incident drew public attention to the waste in Canada’s defence spending and to the under-equipped state of its military. Aaron Plamondon ties the bungled attempts to replace the Sea King – before and since 1993 – to the evolution of the weapons procurement process in Canada since Confederation. He reveals that partisan politics, rather than a desire to increase the military’s capabilities, has driven the nation’s policy-makers.

This book, through an analysis of 49,355 high value public procurement contracts awarded between 2004 and 2011, provides systematic evidence on favoritism in public procurement in Turkey. Public procurement is one of the main areas where the government and the private sector interact extensively and is thus open to favoritism and corruption. In Turkey, the new Public Procurement Law, which was drafted with the pull of the EU-IMF-WB nexus, has been amended more than 150 times by the AKP government. In addition to examining favoritism, this book also demonstrates how the legal amendments have increased the use of less competitive procurement methods and discretion in awarding contracts. The results reveal that the AKP majority government has used public procurement as an influential tool both to increase its electoral success, build its own elites and finance politics. The use of public procurement for rent creation and distribution is found to be particularly extensive in the construction and the services sector through the TOKİ projects and the Municipal procurements.

A history of failed attempts to replace the Sea King maritime helicopter reveals the political nature and shortcomings of the Canadian defence procurement process.

Defence procurement in Canada is a mess, with hundreds of millions of dollars being routinely wasted, despite which the Canadian Armed Forces is woefully underequipped and lacking crucial capacity. Charlie Foxtrot shows why past governments failed so spectacularly to efficiently equip and manage the CAF, and how to change that.

Since the 1990s, government at all levels is under increasing pressure to do more with less. However, despite the U.S. government spending about 15 to 20 percent of its GDP on contracts for goods and services, there is a paucity of reference books for public procurement officials and very few textbooks for courses on the subject. Filling this void, the International Handbook of Public Procurement provides the knowledge necessary to understand how procurement works and how to improve the cost-effectiveness of procurement systems. Taking a multidisciplinary approach, the book focuses on the managerial, economic, political, and legal aspects of this topic. It begins with a conceptual framework and highlights various reforms occurring in certain countries. By examining these improvements, readers are able to apply this knowledge to their own strategies. The next section presents selected cases that illustrate the public procurement process, examining systems in various nations including Germany, China, South Africa, Cambodia, Uganda, and Estonia. The book also discusses the rise of electronic procurement systems (E-procurement) and reviews the benefits of these efficient systems. Other topics presented in this comprehensive volume include practical discussions on contract negotiations, bidding, price strategies and cost analysis, and an insightful chapter on the market’s response to contract award announcements. A virtual encyclopedia from numerous international experts, this book was assembled by Khi V. Thai, Professor at Florida Atlantic University and Editor of the Journal of Public Procurement. Dr. Thai has provided technical assistance in the area of public procurement to governments across the world. Empowering those on all sides of the issue, this volume dispenses advice valuable to government officials and contractors, as well as providing a comprehensive text for public administration students.

First published in 1986. Based on the theme that defense procurement serves as an instrument of alliance and domestic politics, this book provides the first comprehensive analysis of post-war West German approaches to and experience with procurement strategies. Dr. Cowen explores how successive German governments have used military procurement to facilitate the rehabilitation of the new West German state and later to consolidate the German position within the alliance. The author shows that by the mid-1970s the Federal Republic had succeeded in its procurement policy, acting as a serious partner for defense projects in Europe and building a flourishing defense industry. The book's final chapters describe the structural tensions between competing procurement objectives that have recently emerged. The FRG must decide whether to continue to maintain a whole range of defense industrial capacities or to specialize nationally and purchase other necessary commodities in the United States. According to the author, national specialization is not seriously considered by the German government. Such a step, the author suggests, would diminish Germany's role in the alliance and jeopardize one of its foremost foreign policy goals: equality with Great Britain and France

First published in 1986. Based on the theme that defense procurement serves as an instrument of alliance and domestic politics, this book provides the first comprehensive analysis of post-war West German approaches to and experience with procurement strategies. Dr. Cowen explores how successive German governments have used military procurement to facilitate the rehabilitation of the new West German state and later to consolidate the German position within the alliance. The author shows that by the mid-1970s the Federal Republic had succeeded in its procurement policy, acting as a serious partner for defense projects in Europe and building a flourishing defense industry. The book's final chapters describe the structural tensions between competing procurement objectives that have recently emerged. The FRG must decide whether to continue to maintain a whole range of defense industrial capacities or to specialize nationally and purchase other necessary commodities in the United States. According to the author, national specialization is not seriously considered by the German government. Such a step, the author suggests, would diminish Germany's role in the alliance and jeopardize one of its foremost foreign policy goals: equality with Great Britain and France

Americans spend more than $100 billion a year to buy weapons, but no one likes the process that brings these weapons into existence. The problem, McNaugher shows, is that the technical needs of engineers and military planners clash sharply with the political demands of Congress. McNaugher examines weapons procurement since World War II and shows how repeated efforts to improve weapons acquisition have instead increased the harmful intrusion of political pressures into that technical development and procurement process. Today's weapons are more complicated than their predecessors. So are the nation's military forces. The design of new systems and their integration into the force structure demand more care, time, and flexibility. Yet time and flexibility are precisely what political pressures remove from the acquisitions process. In a series of case studies and conceptual discussions, McNaugher tackles concerns at the heart of the debate about acquisition—the slow and heavily bureaucratic approach to development, the preference for ultimate weapons over well-organized and trained forces, and the counterproductive incentives facing the nation's defense firms. He calls for changes that run against the current fashion—less centralization or procurement, less haste in developing new weapons, and greater use of competition as a means of removing the development process from political oversight. Above all, McNaugher shows how the United States tries to buy research and development on the cheap, and how costly this has been. The nation can improve its acquisition process, he concludes, only when it recognizes the need to pay for the full exploration of new technology.