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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First specialised regional training for R2G4P members

The R2G4P project, a spin-off from the SELDI initiative, aims to close the anti-corruption policy implementation and public procurement gaps across SEE, and thus amplify the impact of the planned increase in EU infrastructure support until 2025. The activities will be implemented in the framework of a Regional Good Governance Public-Private Partnership Platform (R2G4P), focusing on nine beneficiary countries (Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Hungary, Romania, North Macedonia, Montenegro, and Serbia).

In order to increase the capacity of CSO …

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ProACT Procurement Anticorruption and Transparency Platform

ProAct Platform

 

The platform has been developed through a collaboration between the World Bank and the Government Transparency Institute. The methodology for the platform is based in part on the methodology developed for the www.opentender.eu project (Funded by the EU’s Horizon 2020), and the Global Integrity Anticorruption Evidence (GI-ACE) program funded by the UK’s FCDO.

The tool provides access to open data from national electronic procurement systems from 46 countries and to open data on World Bank and …

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Lowering Prices of Pharmaceuticals, Medical Supplies, and Equipment: Insights from Big Data for Better Procurement Strategies in Latin America

Fazekas, M., Borges de Oliveira, A., Regös, N. (2021). Lowering Prices of Pharmaceuticals, Medical Supplies, and Equipment: Insights from Big Data for Better Procurement Strategies in Latin America. Policy Research Working Paper No. 9689. World Bank Group, Latin America and the Caribbean Region.

Containing rapidly growing health care costs in the Latin American and the Caribbean region, especially amid the COVID-19 pandemic, requires an in-depth analysis of prices from a novel perspective. This paper documents hitherto understudied variations in prices …

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