Agency Design, Favoritism and Procurement in the United States

Dahlström, C., Fazekas, M., & Lewis, D. E. (2019). Agency Design, Favoritism and Procurement in the United States. QoG Working Paper Series 2019:4, ISSN 1653-8919.

The U.S. federal government spends huge sums buying goods and services from outside of the public sector. Given the sums involved, strategic government purchasing can have electoral consequences. In this paper, we suggest that more politicized agencies show favoritism to entrepreneurs in key electoral constituencies and to firms connected to political parties. We evaluate these

…

Read More

Auction Length and Prices: Evidence from Random Auction Closing in Brazil

Oliveira, A., Fabregas Masllovet, A. & Fazekas, M. (2019). Auction Length and Prices : Evidence from Random Auction Closing in Brazil (English). Policy Research working paper; no. WPS 8828. Washington, D.C.: World Bank Group. 

Electronic reverse auctions are the most used competitive method for procurement of goods and non-consulting services by the Federal Government of Brazil. These auctions are closed randomly, which perfectly satisfies fairness considerations but may be suboptimal from an efficiency perspective. There are concerns that tenders are …

Read More

Analytics for Integrity: Enhancing Integrity Risk Assessments through Data-Driven Approaches

OECD (2019). Analytics for Integrity: Enhancing Integrity Risk Assessments through Data-Driven Approaches. Available at: https://www1.oecd.org/gov/ethics/analytics-for-integrity.pdf

Effective risk management in infrastructure projects relies on strategic and robust risk assessments in order for managers to identify risks and adapt controls to mitigating them. Risk assessments are often qualitative, relying on observations of employees and experts involved in the projects. To complement these perception-based approaches, those responsible for managing risks in infrastructure—project managers, procurement officials and risk managers—can take advantage of data analytics …

Read More

Objective corruption risk indicators that use donor project and contract data

Fazekas, M. & Márk, L. (2017). Objective corruption risk indicators using donor project and contract data. GTI-R/2017:02, Budapest, Government Transparency Institute, September 2017.

To validate our red flags we use macro level perception-based indicators and test if these move together with the country-level averages of our red flags. We also try to find testable micro level relationships either on contract- or project-level data and check if different red flags are consistent with each other. The three donors largely differ in

…

Read More

Social capital predicts corruption risk in towns

Wachs, J., Yasseri, T., Lengyel, B., Kertész, J. (2019). Social capital predicts corruption risk in towns. Royal Society Open Science 6: 182103. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsos.182103

Corruption is a social plague: gains accrue to small groups, while its costs are borne by everyone. Significant variation in its level between and within countries suggests a relationship between social structure and the prevalence of corruption, yet, large-scale empirical studies thereof have been missing due to lack of data. In this paper, we relate the structural …

Read More

Big Data Analytics for Social Science Research

Mihály Fazekas has contributed two presentations to the SAGE Research Methods Video Platform on Data Science, Big Data Analytics, & Digital Methods.

 

Video 1: Introduction to Big Data for Social Science Research

Mihály Fazekas discusses using big data for social science research including, new data sources and what they can help achieve, the difference between big data and traditional research methodology, and the collection and analysis of big data.

Video 2: Using Big Data to Measure Formidable Concepts: The …

Read More

Administrative capacities that matter: organisational drivers of public procurement competitiveness in 32 European countries

Cingolani, L. & Fazekas, M. (2019). Administrative capacities that matter: organisational drivers of public procurement competitiveness in 32 European countries. GTI-WP/2019:01, Budapest: Government Transparency Institute.

In spite of the many efforts in the pursuit of a European single market, many barriers continue to lie ahead, as the field of public procurement illustrates. In 2015, around 40% of all high-value procurement tenders in a large pool of European countries attracted only 2 bidders or less, and only 3% of all winning

…

Read More

Are emerging technologies helping win the fight against corruption in developing countries?

Adam, I., and Fazekas, M. (2019). Are emerging technologies helping win the fight against corruption in developing countries? Pathways for Prosperity Commission Background Paper Series; no. 21. Oxford, United Kingdom

This paper systematically takes stock of the latest academic and policy literature that sheds light on Information and Communication Technology (ICT) tools and their impact on corruption. The tools reviewed include digital public services, crowdsourcing platforms, whistleblowing tools, transparency portals, big data, distributed ledger technology (DLT), and artificial intelligence (AI). …

Read More

Political Competition and Public Procurement Outcomes

Broms, R., Dahlström, C., & Fazekas, M. (2019). Political Competition and Public Procurement Outcomes. Comparative Political Studies. https://doi.org/10.1177/0010414019830723

This article asks if low political competition is associated with more restricted public procurement processes. Using unique Swedish municipal data from 2009 to 2015, it demonstrates that when one party dominates local politics, noncompetitive outcomes from public procurement processes are more common. What is most striking is that the risk of receiving only one bid, on what is intended to be an …

Read More

Data update of World Bank, IADB, and EuropeAid datasets on development aid funded contracts and projects

The DFID-funded project “Curbing Corruption in Government Contracting” is releasing an update on the datasets collected on development projects, public tenders, and contracts for three major donor agencies: the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB), and EuropeAid. The datasets not only republish structured data gathered from official source websites, but also contain corruption risk red flags developed by the research team.

About the project

The project entitled “Curbing Corruption in Government Contracting” analyses how procurement can be manipulated for …

Read More