The new EP Library Catalogue allows you to search the EP collection for:
- Journals, books and articles in paper or electronic format
- EPRS and Policy Department publications
Abstract: Incorporating circular economy principles into forward-thinking public procurement strategies enhances sustainability through the promotion of resource efficiency, sustainable sourcing, and extended producer responsibility. This approach not only encourages innovation and collaboration among suppliers but also drives the development of solutions aligned with circular economy goals. The ultimate result is a more cost-effective and environmentally friendly outcome in procurement. This article seeks to investigate the intersection of circular economy principles within the framework of an innovative public procurement system. The study explores the influence of globalization on this innovative public procurement paradigm, addressing both the challenges and opportunities inherent in the process. The study conceptualizes Innovative Public Procurement (IPP) as a strategic approach where public entities acquire goods, services, works, and utilities, emphasizing an optimal balance between price and quality. The central goal is to generate innovative benefits for both entities and society, all while minimizing adverse environmental effects.
Abstract: Public procurement is a mechanism through which the public sector can benefit from the latest technological processes and assistance from the private sector, while retaining its position as the main decision-maker in setting and implementing investment policies. This paper aims to make a quantitative analysis in an attempt to identify, to what extend, the contracting authorities in Romania, given the increased demand for the purchase of IT equipment caused by the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the recommendations of the European Commission in this field, have used, in their tender documents, evaluation criteria/factors specific to circular purchasing. In addition, the analysis aims to establish how the recycling and circularity process can be determined from the early stage of the tender documents, when establishing the evaluation factors that will directly impact the contract winner. Using principal component analysis and the Cronbach coefficient alpha combined with “the Varimax” method, the nature and the weight of the evaluation factors have been identified in a circular procurement process, considering the best value for money. The final findings represent a mix of criteria for IT circular procurement to be used to push the suppliers to clean/green production and to pull the market to a circular economy sales and consumption paradigm.
Abstract: The link between human rights and environmental due diligence and public procurement has been recognized in soft law, and in a less consistent way in EU hard law. Particularly, it has been an issue of concern in the law-making process for the EU Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive. Despite increasing attention, considerable debate remains over the inclusion of human rights and environmental due diligence in public procurement, which is still an underdeveloped topic. This article contributes to enlightening the debate and filling this gap by exploring the link between human rights and environmental due diligence and public procurement, then by analysing whether and how human rights and environmental due diligence can be incorporated into EU public procurement as a contract performance condition and comply with the requirement of the link to the subject matter of the contract.
Abstract: Labour rights violations and poor working conditions are rife in global production networks (GPNs). Until now research on labour governance in GPNs has been dominated by private measures. We ignite discussions on the role of the state in governing labour conditions in GPNs by focusing on a less well-known public governance instrument – socially responsible public procurement (SRPP). SRPP is the inclusion of social criteria on working conditions in public procurement contracts. Revised European Union (EU) directives on public procurement widened the space to exercise SRPP including for outsourced and offshored production. Understanding how states can exercise SRPP as a labour governance instrument requires a conceptualization of state powers. We present a conceptualization of the hybrid regulator-buyer state and show that an effective SRPP approach requires both strong regulator powers, differentiated as legislative, institutional, judicial and discursive, and buyer power which depend on purchasing volumes and supplier and market characteristics.
Abstract: The COVID-19 pandemic swept throughout the European Union swiftly and led to significant changes in how we live and operate. Some of those changes occurred in public procurement as well, with Member States struggling to react to the dissemination of the virus. The purpose of this paper is to assess what scope the EU's public procurement legal framework provides to deal with a crisis, and how the rules should be interpreted. This paper will show how the EU public procurement legal framework deals with extreme urgency situations and how it has been intentionally designed to allow Member States flexibility within very clearly defined boundaries. This means that the path to award contracts without competition on the grounds of extreme urgency is narrow due to Article 32(2)(c) of Directive 2014/24/EU 1 and the case law from the CJEU. The narrowness of this path is due to the exceptional nature of procedure and the obligation for the contracting authority to discharge the tight grounds for use in full for every contract.
Abstract: Analysing the environmental actorness of the EU, more than one voice has spoken of the myth of a Green Europe and a dismantling process of its environmental ambitions. To date, any attempt to quantify this in a homogeneous fashion by different levels of government and institutions has run into serious difficulties. This research, however, uses green public procurement (GPP) as the research instrument to quantify the commitment to environmental policies. We construct the database from tenders published in the Supplement to the Official Journal between 2009 and 2019. Based on more than 743,061 observations, the article finds that the EU's institutions have the lowest GPP adoption rates in relation to all other levels of government. Moreover, it also records marked differences between the EU institutions where the European Parliament is performing better than the European Commission and, during Juncker Commission, EC performs worse.
Abstract: Green public procurement is assumed to have a strong steering effect. The recent EU Green Deal contains proposals to amend green public procurement rules from voluntary to mandatory regulation, which has been endorsed by several legal scholars. At the same time, the effectiveness of green public procurement as an environmental policy tool has been studied in economics, where research results present a reserved approach towards green public procurement’s effectiveness. This article examines green public procurement applying a law and economics methodology, with the goal of combining the approaches from different disciplines and finding ways in which environmental objectives can be effectively addressed through procurement regulation. The main conclusions are that the steering effect, costs and potential environmental impact of green public procurement vary in different industries and therefore a sector-specific approach should be adopted in the development of green public procurement regulation. In order to encourage companies to invest and develop their operations in a greener direction, it is important that a large number of contracting authorities use harmonized green public procurement criteria. Further, the effects of green public procurement regulation on competition and emissions from the private consumer market should be monitored and the potential of public procurement to achieve environmental objectives should be explored and compared with other policy options.
Abstract: Public procurement has been studied by numerous researchers and is considered to be an effective instrument for leading public and private actors to implement more sustainable practices. For researchers, public procurement can be leveraged to develop innovative practices oriented towards sustainability and create new markets for eco-friendly products. However, there is still a paucity of empirical evidence on the mechanisms by which public procurement can effectively stimulate sustainable innovation and foster the development of greener markets in relation to circular economy. To shed light on the emerging issue of circular public procurement, we use a qualitative method relying on an empirical case relating to a public tender in Denmark. Our research shows that public procurement can be studied as a design activity and clarifies the mechanisms by which public procurement can stimulate sustainable innovation in organizations, creating opportunities for collective innovative practices. Furthermore, we shed light on the process through which circular public procurement can create green markets, defining the qualities of the goods to be exchanged.
Abstract: We empirically compare bids (i.e. prices) from temporary partnerships (TPs), that outsource part of the contract before the auction, and firms that outsource afterwards. Using a comprehensive dataset on procurement auctions for public works in Valle d’Aosta (Italy), we find that the timing of outsourcing affects the bids and the probability of winning the auction. Specifically, TPs bid closer to the payoff maximizing offer and are more likely to win. Hence, the price paid by the public buyer is lower. These results are supported by a simple theoretical setting showing that, by pre-committing to a TP, suppliers have a lower risk of being “held up” by subcontractors than firms that outsource part of the work after the bidding phase. Our results show the advantage for TPs of freely choosing partners, size and boundaries before the auction, highlighting their potential in fostering the effective participation in public procurement procedures of Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs).
Abstract: This paper provides a comprehensive literature review of preliminary publications on green and sustainable public procurement from the year 2000 until now. The aim of the review is to organise, evaluate and identify patterns and clusters in published articles, providing an overview of the state of the art in green and sustainable public procurement. Classification of the data identified three overall themes: organisational aspects, individual behaviour and operational tools, which comprise nine sub-categories: three organisational, two behavioural and four operational. The review shows how awareness and knowledge of circular public procurement attributes, based on circular policy and strategy implementation, are essential to conduct circular public procurement. The procurer’s beliefs and values are of high relevance in a transformation towards circular public procurement, simply not going for the lowest price, but finding an optimum combination that includes risk, timeliness and cost for the public institution on a life-cycle basis. Eco-labels, standards, life cycle assessments and life cycle costing are core parts of the process. Outlining the present knowledge as a foundation for future research in circular public procurement process development, this paper holds implications for both academics and procurement practitioners.
Abstract: Judicial Europeanization, particularly European case law and the Rüffert ruling, has created significant legal uncertainty in the use of labour clauses in public procurement, which may constrain national policymakers. However, national actors find ways to ‘push back’ against Europeanization in order to prioritize domestic policy goals. By analysing the long-term political dynamic surrounding public procurement in Denmark, Germany and the UK since the implementation of the revised 2014 public procurement directive, we show how both national actors, and actors at subnational level, where much public procurement actually takes place, contest the Europeanization of public policies. Variation in the willingness and ability of actors to leverage the legal uncertainty to adopt labour clauses results in diverging policy trajectories, but also creates a room for policy innovation. This alters the ultimate outcome of the European regulatory agenda and results in a continued divergence of public policies across member states.
Abstract: In 2014, a newly enacted set of directives sought to reform the EU Public Procurement Regime, promoting stronger harmonisation but also more flexibility in procurement activities throughout the European Union. Amendments to public contracts after the award have long been a grey area, both for contracting authorities and tenderers alike. However, given the economic importance of public procurement for the European economy, the sound functioning of procurement rules is key. Hence, the article aims to provide a comprehensive evaluation of the new provisions, especially as far as amendments to public works contracts due to the necessity of additional works (following, inter alia, inadequate planning) and unforeseeable circumstances (typically entailing delays, cost overruns etc.) are concerned. In this respect, drawing on sources from legal scholarship of different EU Member States (eg, Germany, France, Spain) and the UK, this article provides an analysis of the rules on post-award amendments to public contracts with an emphasis on Article 72 of Directive 2014/24/EU. To identify the underpinning ideas of these rules, the article considers policy goals and constraints as well as the relevant case law of the Court of Justice of the European Union.
Abstract: This article argues that while EU public procurement law increasingly allows public authorities to take environmental and social considerations into account in public purchasing decisions, it does impose limits on the possibility for authorities to incentivise corporate social responsibility (CSR) policies through public procurement. These specific limits are the result of the EU legislator's choice to endorse the Court of Justice's ordoliberal approach to public procurement law. This approach is in tension with EU CSR policy, and more broadly, the EU's non-economic goals such as environmental protection, the fight against climate change, human rights and social policy. It reflects a normative preference for the right of undertakings to compete for a tender over the freedom of government authorities to choose a supplier on public interest grounds even if these choices are based exclusively on a legitimate public interest and should be reconsidered.
Abstract: This paper contributes to the literature on the role of public procurement in encouraging innovations in the economy by empirically examining how the inverted-U relationship between competition and innovation is related to SME behavior in public procurement. First, we establish the inverted-U relationship in our data. We find that ‘intra-provincial suppliers’ (SMEs supplying mainly to public sector customers in their own municipality and province) are less innovation-oriented than ‘supra-provincial suppliers’ (supplying mainly to public sector customers residing outside their own province). In addition, a descriptive analysis suggests that the innovativeness of intra-provincial suppliers exhibits a weakly positive relationship with competition. However, the innovativeness of supra-provincial suppliers appears to be negatively related to competition at high levels of competition, but not at low levels of competition.
Abstract: Public organizations are using sustainable public procurement (SPP) as a policy tool to address societal and environmental issues. Having a policy on SPP however does not guarantee implementation. Several barriers have for example been identified that prevent public procurers from implementing SPP in their procurement projects, such as financial constraints, lack of knowledge or motivation. The question therefore arises how much SPP public organizations actually implement in their procurement projects. However, existing studies often focus on the environmental part of SPP and often rely on using interviews or surveys to assess the perceived degree of SPP (which have been accused of being subject to social desirability bias and low response rates). Little is therefore known about what SPP is in practice, and how frequently it is implemented. In this study, we therefore provide a detailed operationalization of SPP that encompasses the full concept. We subsequently assess the implementation of SPP in practice using text mining techniques to analyse over 140.000 Belgian public procurement notices that were published between 2011 and 2016. The research shows that in more than 70% of the notices (with an annex) SPP is implemented, but there appears to be a downward trend. It seems that SPP is implemented less over time, rather than more. Environmentally friendly procurement was, relative to other types of SPP, prevalent over time and across regions. For SPP to live up to its potential there are thus still barriers to be overcome.
Abstract: In this paper, we document border effects in the award of public contracts in the European single market. We use a dataset of 1.8 million contract awards, which we match to geolocations to estimate a gravity model of procurement flows between European NUTS3 region pairs. We find very sizable cross-national border effects for all types of goods and services, even after controlling for physical distance, currency, cultural differences and other variables. For example, 'local' bidders for IT services contracts are almost 250 times more likely to be awarded a contract than 'foreign' bidders. More surprisingly, we find substantial cross-regional border effects within countries. While we document that firms' bidding decisions are subject to border effects, we cannot exclude a home bias of contracting authorities in the award of public contracts.
If you are unable to access the article you need, please contact us and we will get it for you as soon as possible.
| Data Protection Notice | Cookie Policy & Inventory |
 |
 |
 |
Journals on all devices |
Books, articles, EPRS publications & more |
Newspapers on all devices |