Article
'Sweet Deals': State-owned Enterprises, Corruption and Repeated Contracts in Public Procurement
We show how a price analysis of stable relations between customer and supplier in the public procurement of homogeneous goods can help differentiate opportunistic from honest behaviour among economic agents. We consider two types of stable relations: repeated procurements and connections based on the state ownership of suppliers. On the basis of a large dataset on the procurement of granulated sugar in Russia from 2011 to 2013, we find that for private suppliers, prices of repeated contracts were lower compared to one-time deals when procured through more transparent procedures and higher when procured through non-transparent procedures. For non-transparent procedures, we observe significant overpricing of contracts with state-owned suppliers compared to private suppliers, especially in the case of repeated contracts, whereas for competitive e-auctions, there is only a small difference between the contract prices of state-owned suppliers and private suppliers.
The Handbook of Business and Corruption provides an overview of corrupt business practices in general and, more particularly, in different industry sectors, considering such practices from an ethical perspective.
The paper is about sustainable public procurement as a new global trend in the development of a sustainable economy. The main question raised is the following: how sustainable public procurement could be implemented in Russia? The study aims to investigate the prospects of the implementation of sustainable public procurement in Russia. The author presents the findings of survey, covering public procurement practices of 51 contracting authorities and documentation analysis of 400 public tenders. The analysis of Russian legislation allows to determine the sections of procurement documentation, where different aspects of sustainability could be included. The conducted survey aims to identify the aspects of sustainable public procurement already used by public authorities in procuring practices in Russia. This paper provides the unique survey of sustainable procurement practices across the Russian public sector. Research also shows the prerequisites of implementation of sustainable public procurement in Russia.
The paper is about sustainable public procurement as a new global trend in the development of a sustainable economy. The main question raised is the following: how sustainable public procurement could be implemented in Russia? The study aims to investigate the prospects of the implementation of sustainable public procurement in Russia. The author presents the findings of survey, covering public procurement practices of 51 contracting authorities and documentation analysis of 400 public tenders. The analysis of Russian legislation allows to determine the sections of procurement documentation, where different aspects of sustainability could be included. The conducted survey aims to identify the aspects of sustainable public procurement already used by public authorities in procuring practices in Russia. This paper provides the unique survey of sustainable procurement practices across the Russian public sector. Research also shows the prerequisites of implementation of sustainable public procurement in Russia.
We address the external effects on public sector efficiency measures acquired using Data Envelopment Analysis. We use the health care system in Russian regions in 2011 to evaluate modern approaches to accounting for external effects. We propose a promising method of correcting DEA efficiency measures. Despite the multiple advantages DEA offers, the usage of this approach carries with it a number of methodological difficulties. Accounting for multiple factors of efficiency calls for more complex methods, among which the most promising are DMU clustering and calculating local production possibility frontiers. Using regression models for estimate correction requires further study due to possible systematic errors during estimation. A mixture of data correction and DMU clustering together with multi-stage DEA seems most promising at the moment. Analyzing several stages of transforming society’s resources into social welfare will allow for picking out the weak points in a state agency’s work.