Can impact assessments tame legislative drift? Event history analysis of modifications of laws across Europe

Brenner, D., & Fazekas, M. (2021). Can impact assessmentstame legislative drift? Event history analysis of modifications of laws across Europe.Governance, available online: https://doi.org/10.1111/gove.12649

Laws should endure and change only if assumed benefits don’t materialize over time. Yet frequent modifications of laws shortly after their enactment distort this compromise between stability and change. While, Impact Assessments (IAs) are designed to improve the quality of legislation, we know little about IAs’ impact on legal stability post-enactment. We fill this gap by analysing …

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The extra-legal governance of corruption: Tracing the organization of corruption in public procurement

Fazekas, M., Sberna, S., & Vannucci, A. (2021). The extra-legalgovernance of corruption: Tracing the organization of corruption in public procurement. Governance, available online: https://doi.org/10.1111/gove.12648

This article traces the organization of corruption in public procurement, by theoretically and empirically assessing the contribution of extra-legal governance organizations (EGO) to supporting it. Theoretically, we explore the governance role played by organized criminal groups in corruption networks, facilitating corrupt transactions by lowering search costs, bargaining costs, and enforcement cots. Empirically, the analysis exploits a …

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COVID-19 emergency public procurement in Romania: Corruption risks and market behavior

Abdou, A., Czibik, Á., Tóth, B. and Fazekas, M. (2021): COVID-19 emergency public procurement in Romania: Corruption risks and market behavior. GTI-WP/2021:03, Budapest: Government Transparency Institute.

The aim of this research is to track corruption risks affecting the Romanian public procurement system during the COVID-19 emergency. We develop a composite Corruption Risk Index (CRI) to track public procurement contracting risks in Romania in the period from 2015 to 2021. We find that the emergency context exposed the procurement process to …

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Are Emerging Technologies Helping Win the Fight Against Corruption? A Review of the State of Evidence

Adam, I. and Fazekas, M (2021): Are emerging technologies helping win the fight against corruption? A review of the state of evidence. Information Economics and Policy. 57, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infoecopol.2021.100950

Information and Communication Technology (ICT) is often thought of as a uniformly positive tool making governments more transparent, accountable, and less corrupt. However, the evidence on it is mixed and often misunderstood. Hence, this article carries out a systematic stocktaking of ICT tools’ impact on corruption, offering a nuanced and context-dependent assessment. …

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Measuring Regional Quality of Government: The Public Spending Quality Index Based on Government Contracting Data

Czibik, Á. and Fazekas, M (2021): Measuring regional quality of government: the public spending quality index based on government contracting data. Regional Studies. 55(8), pp. 1459-1472, 10.1080/00343404.2021.1902975

Government contracting is crucial for defining the quality of government and public services because it amounts to about 29% of government spending. However, regional quality of government indicators, especially for public spending, are largely missing. We assess the quality of public spending by transparency, competition, efficiency and corruption using a novel database of …

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Gender in European Public Procurement: Extent, Distribution, and Impacts

Fazekas, M., Kazmina, Y. and Wachs, J. (2020). Gender in European Public Procurement: Extent, Distribution, and Impacts. London: European Bank for Reconstruction and Development.

A crucially under-documented gender gap is the difference in public procurement spending that flows to companies led or owned by men vs. women. The role of gender in public procurement is of wide interest given that public procurement represents about a third of government spending in OECD countries. As country-level gender data on labour force participation …

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Objective corruption risk indicators using Low and Middle Income Country datasets

Regös, N. & Fazekas, M. (2021). Objective corruption risk indicators using Low and Middle Income Country datasets. GTI-R/2021:01, Budapest, Government Transparency Institute, August 2021.

In 2018 global public procurement spend was $11 trillion, accounting for 12% of global GDP (Djankov et al, 2020). This indicates that to prevent deliberate (fraud, corruption) or unintentional (waste, inefficiency) misuse of public resources through overpriced, delayed or low quality public works, goods or services is essential to avoid significant negative impact on social welfare, …

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Global Public Procurement Open Competition Index

Adam, I., H. Sanchez, A. and Fazekas, M. (2021). Global Public Procurement Open Competition Index. GTI-WP/2021:02, Budapest: Government Transparency Institute.

This evidence paper seeks to clearly outline the benefits of open competition in public procurement, review the policies fostering it and measuring competitive outcomes in carefully selected comparable markets across a wide array of countries. Our review of evidence regarding benefits of and policies for open competition is based on high-quality academic and policy offering reliable quantitative estimates. Our competition …

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GTI’s Global Government Contracts database

Contract level data: scope and sources

The Government Transparency Institute has collected administrative data on government contracts and tenders from official public procurement portals and public institutions’ data repositories. This database covers 170 countries, including a third from national public procurement sources and the rest using data on contracts financed by multilateral financial institutions. While some countries report as far back as 1961, reliable electronic public procurement portals became available in the early 2000s. In total, the dataset includes over …

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Global public procurement dataset: selected Low and Middle Income Country datasets

The FCDO-funded (formerly DFID) project “Curbing Corruption in Government Contracting” releases the contracting datasets collected from national public procurement portals in 10 low and middle income countries: Chile, Colombia, India, Indonesia, Jamaica, Kenya, Mexico, Paraguay, Uganda and Uruguay. The datasets republish structured data gathered from official source websites and also contain corruption risk indicators developed by the research team.

 

About the project

In recent years, publishing and analysing administrative data on government contracts and tenders has an …

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