Mara Mendes, Mihály Fazekas (2017): Towards More Transparent and Efficient Contracting – Public Procurement in the European Union. DIGIWHIST publications. March 2017.
URL: https://opentender.eu/blog/2017-03-towards-more-transparency/
Approximately 15% of the EU’s Gross Domestic Product is spent every year on procuring goods and services, and some estimates indicate that corruption increases the cost of government contracts by 20 – 25%. It is even more worrying that corruption in public procurement compromises widely supported public goals, such as building safe highways, high quality school buildings, or delivering medicine in time. These are a few of the main reasons why more research needs to be done on how to make public procurement more efficient and transparent. Addressing this gap is what the EU-funded, large-scale project DIGIWHIST does. This policy paper presents key data challenges in public procurement and proposes recommendations to improve the state of data and data use for better outcomes.