COVID-19

Corruption risks in public procurement through the COVID-19 pandemic in Europe

Fazekas, M., Hernandez Sanchez, A., Abdou, A. and Kofrán, D. (2023). Corruption risks in public procurement through the COVID-19 pandemic in Europe. GTI-WP/2023:03, Budapest: Government Transparency Institute.

The COVID-19 pandemic has been a major emergency globally, requiring rapid responses to protect citizens’ health and lives. In order to inform future emergency policies, this paper sets out to track the corruption risk impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and the policies implemented to tackle the pandemic.
We adopt a mixed-methods approach, …

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Bulgaria Country Economic Memorandum : A Path to High Income

Desislava Nikolova, Mihaly Fazekas, Bence Tóth, Viktoriia Poltoratskaia, Marc Schiffbauer, et al. (2023) Bulgaria; Country Economic Memorandum : A Path to High Income (English). Washington, D.C. : World Bank Group.

Bulgaria has followed sound macroeconomic policy in recent years and has weathered the Covid-19 economic crisis relatively well. The country embarked on a thorough transformation to a functioning market economy in the run-up to European Union (EU) membership in 2007 which, since 2018, has been followed by a firm course …

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Poland Public Finance Review – Public Procurement: Saving and Greening

Fazekas, Mihaly; Ziolkowska, Barbara; and Regos, Nóra (2022) Public Procurement: Saving and Greening. In World Bank (2022) Poland Public Finance Review, World Bank, Washington DC. Chapter 4.

Poland’s public finance management was prudent in the years preceding the COVID-19 pandemic and facilitated a swift, substantial, and frontloaded policy response to the crisis. Poland built fiscal buffers in the years before the COVID-19 pandemic through spending containment and improved tax collections, aided by robust growth. This created the fiscal space …

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Countering Public Grant Fraud in Spain: Machine Learning for Assessing Risks and Targeting Control Activities

OECD (2021), Countering Public Grant Fraud in Spain: Machine Learning for Assessing Risks and Targeting Control Activities, OECD Public Governance Reviews, Paris: OECD Publishing, https://doi.org/10.1787/0ea22484-en.

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, marked by a high volume of accelerated spending, fraud risks have become a pressing concern for governments worldwide. In this environment, public control and audit bodies play a vital role to ensure money is well spent and vulnerabilities are spotted and addressed quickly. In Spain, the General Comptroller …

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Public procurement under and after emergencies

Fazekas, M., Nishchal, S. and Søreide, T. (2021): Public procurement under and after emergencies. In Bandiera, O., Bosio, E. and Spagnolo, G. (Ed.), Procurement in Focus – Rules, Discretion, and Emergencies. London: CEPR Press. pp.33-42. 

Covid-19 has served as a global case study for increased discretion in public procurement, with governments worldwide making rules more flexible to increase spending, reduce the damage, and save lives. This CEPR eBook provides fascinating insights into the tension between rules and discretion in public …

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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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Emergency Procurement: The Role of Big Open Data

Fazekas, Mihály, and Sánchez, Alfredo H Hernandez (2021) Emergency Procurement: The Role of Big Open Data. In S. Arrowsmith, L. Butler, A. L. Chimia and C. Yukins (eds.) Public Procurement in (a) Crisis: global lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic. Hart Publishing. Chapter 23.

The 2020 Global Pandemic has been a watershed moment for the world economy on a scale unseen since the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. The COVID-19 crisis has demanded rapid government responses around the world, from the re-erection …

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