Lights on the shadows of public procurement: Transparency as an antidote to corruption

Abstract

The increased focus on marketizing mechanisms and contracting‐out operations following the New Public Management reform agenda has sparked a debate on whether the close interactions between public and private actors might drive corruption in the public sector. The main response to those worries has been increased transparency, but so far empirical evidence of its efficiency remains scant and mixed. This article argues that the beneficial effects of transparency on corruption are contingent on type of transparency, and in particular, who the intended receiver of the information is. Drawing on newly collected data of more than 3.5 million government contracts between 2006 and 2015, the analysis shows that overall tender transparency reduces corruption risks substantially, yet that the effect is largely driven by ex ante transparency, that is, transparency that allows for horizontal monitoring by insiders in the bidding process.

Measuring regional quality of government: the public spending quality index based on government contracting data

“…Transparency should concern all the information pertaining to public procurement processes and outcomes such as general laws, regulations, judicial decisions, administrative rulings, procedures and policies on public procurement, statistics on procurement activities, and individual procedures and award decisions. While excess transparency may harm competition in some cases (e.g., disclosure of commercially sensitive information), generally more transparency in European public procurement is deemed desirable (Bauhr et al, 2020). While transparency of course has a broader meaning, here it is narrowly defined as compliance with the already extensive information disclosure requirements in EU Public Procurement Directives.…”

“…Transparency indicators aim to capture different aspects of public procurement information availability within TED which have been shown to influence bidding outcomes and organizational behaviour (Bauhr et al, 2020;Tóth & Fazekas, 2017). First, publishing the call for tenders notice on TED assures that a wider pool of bidders can access timely information on a bidding opportunity, as opposed to publishing only via national public procurement portals or newspapers (Table 1).…”

Will Women Executives Reduce Corruption? Marginalization and Network Inclusion

“…Therefore, we elect to proxy the level of corruption in a municipality by taking advantage of recently released objective data on corruption risks in public procurement ( Fazekas & Kocis, 2017 ). While some might argue that France is a relatively low corrupt country, 9 corruption in procurement, unlike petty corruption, occurs at a high (often unseen) level and plagues both developed and developing countries Bauhr et al (2020) . 10 In addition to a large number of observations in terms of municipalities, France is also a case with the greatest amount of procurement contracts in the dataset—with 1.08 million available from, 2005 to 2016.…”

When does transparency improve public services? Street‐level discretion, information, and targeting

“…Transparency is frequently advocated as a necessary condition for improving government quality, promoting accountability, and reducing the scope for corruption and impunity (Stiglitz 2002; UNODC 2004; Islam 2006; Kosack and Fung 2014; Bauhr and Grimes 2014; De Renzio and Wehner 2017; Ríos et al 2018). However, evidence for the benefits of transparency is mixed (Bauhr et al 2020). On the one hand, there is considerable empirical support for the effects of increased transparency on public demand for accountability and better government performance (Alt et al 2002; Besley and Burgess 2002; Brunetti and Weder 2003; Reinikka and Svensson 2005; Winters and Weitz‐Shapiro 2013).…”