Measuring the Risk of Corruption and Its Price Impact in North Macedonia 2011–2022

Fazekas, Mihály; Abdou, Aly; Ibrahimi, Klea; Tóth, Bence; & Veljanov, Zdravko (2024) Measuring the Risk of Corruption and Its Price Impact in North Macedonia 2011–2022. Policy Research working paper: WPS11007, Washington, D.C.: World Bank.
Public procurement in North Macedonia amounted to 16 percent of total government expenditure in 2018, or 5 percent of gross domestic product. The country’s public procurement is also vulnerable to corruption risks, which typically push prices up, leading to overspending. To support better budget policies, this
…

Read More

North Macedonia: Public Finance Review. Ensuring Stability and Boosting Resilience.

Fazekas, M.; Regös, N.; Tóth, B.; Ibrahimi, K.; and Zdravko Veljanov (2024) Improving the Efficiency of Public Procurement. In World Bank (2024) North Macedonia: Public Finance Review. Ensuring Stability and Boosting Resilience. Chapter 6.A. World Bank, Washington, DC.

This report proposes designing such a strategy in light of macroeconomic risks. It analyzes North Macedonia’s major macroeconomic and fiscal weaknesses, risks, and debt sustainability. It discusses tax policy and compliance challenges. Regarding government effectiveness, thereport highlights the need to enhance public …

Read More

Green Is Less Greedy : Competition, Corruption, and Productivity in Green Public Procurement in Bulgaria

Poltoratskaia,Viktoriia; Fazekas,Mihaly; Quintero,Maria Fernanda; & Schiffbauer, Marc Tobias. (2024) Green Is Less Greedy : Competition, Corruption, and Productivity in Green Public Procurement in Bulgaria. Policy Research Working Paper: WPS10987, Washington, D.C.: The World Bank.

Although green public procurement has been established as a desirable policy goal across the globe, especially in the European Union, its scope and impacts remain severely understudied. This paper provides insights into the prevalence and structure of green public procurement in Bulgaria, which is a sustainability …

Read More

The political economy of open contracting reforms in low‐ and middle‐income countries

Adam, I., Dávid‐Barrett, E., & Fazekas, M. (2024). The political economy of open contracting reforms in low‐ and middle‐income countries. Governance, 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1111/gove.12897

Transparency reforms make government contracting more open and amenable to public scrutiny, helping to improve public spending efficiency. But they are also politically sensitive, complex and highly technical, which makes them especially difficult to implement if state capacity is weak. Our research on nine low- and middle-income countries in Africa and Asia systematically assesses progress in improving …

Read More

Measuring Legislative Predictability: The Case of the Kingdom of Jordan and Implications for the MENA Region

Fazekas, Mihály; Brenner, Dominik & Ladegaard, Peter Farup (2024), Measuring Legislative Predictability: The Case of the Kingdom of Jordan and Implications for the MENA Region, Policy Research working paper, WPS10864, World Bank Group

Laws and regulations represent a central tool for governments to achieve policy objectives, and they also represent a fundamental condition for making desirable individual and business decisions. While laws and regulations regularly have to be adapted to changing circumstances, frequent and sudden modifications indicate legislative unpredictability and …

Read More

Predicting pharmaceutical prices. Advances based on purchase-level data and machine learning

Mihály Fazekas, Zdravko Veljanov and Alexandre Borges de Oliveira (2024) Predicting pharmaceutical prices. Advances based on purchase-level data and machine learning. BMC Public Health 24. Article 1888. 

Background

Increased costs in the health sector have put considerable strain on the public budgets allocated to pharmaceutical purchases. Faced with such pressures amplified by financial crises and pandemics, national purchasing authorities are presented with a puzzle: how to procure pharmaceuticals of the highest quality for the lowest price. The literature explored a …

Read More

Using beneficial ownership data for large-scale risk assessment in public procurement. The example of 6 European countries

Arista, Irene Tello; Fazekas, Mihály & Volkotrub, Antonina (2024), Using beneficial ownership data for large-scale risk assessment in public procurement. The example of 6 European countries. GTI-WP/2024:02, Budapest: Government Transparency Institute

This paper fills a critical gap in the literature, providing practical insights into employing beneficial ownership data for large-scale corruption risk assessment in public procurement, with potential implications for public policy and practice. Existing literature lacks systematic evidence on using beneficial ownership (BO) data for large-scale corruption risk assessment. …

Read More

Hidden barriers to open competition: Using text mining to uncover corrupt restrictions to competition in public procurement

Katona, Eszter & Fazekas, Mihály (2024). Hidden barriers to open competition: Using text mining to uncover corrupt restrictions to competition in public procurement. GTI-WP/2024:01, Budapest: Government Transparency Institute

Public procurement accounts for one third of government spending across the world, while it is also particularly vulnerable to corruption. Large amounts of open administrative data enabled a rich literature on measuring corruption. However, scholarship largely focuses on structured information on government tenders, neglecting text fields which are particularly suitable for hiding …

Read More

Global Contract-level Public Procurement Dataset

Mihály Fazekas, Bence Toth, Aly Abdou and Ahmed Al-Shaibani (2024) Global Contract-level Public Procurement Dataset. Data in Brief. 2024. april.

One-third of total government spending across the globe goes to public procurement, amounting to about 10 trillion dollars a year. Despite its vast size and crucial importance for economic and political developments, there is a lack of globally comparable data on contract awards and tenders run. To fill this gap, this article introduces the Global Public Procurement Dataset (GPPD). Using …

Read More

Collusion Risk in Corporate Networks

Isabela Villamil, János Kertész, and Mihály Fazekas (2024) Collusion Risk in Corporate Networks. Scientific Reports, 14.

Collusion among economic operators increases prices, reduces product quality, and hinders innovation. Structural links can affect the incentive and ability of firms to behave competitively by facilitating collusion. We use a network-based approach to study the relationship between ownership links and bidding behavior in procurement markets. We build temporal multiplex networks based on firms’ ownership and co-bidding ties to find network measures that may …

Read More