Corruption red flags in public procurement: new evidence from Italian calls for tenders

Francesco Decarolis and Cristina Giorgiantonio

No 544, Questioni di Economia e Finanza (Occasional Papers) from Bank of Italy, Economic Research and International Relations Area

Abstract: This paper contributes to the analysis of quantitative indicators (i.e., red flags or screens) to detect corruption in public procurement. Expanding the set of commonly discussed indicators in the literature to new ones derived from the operating practices of police forces and the judiciary, this paper verifies the presence of these red flags in a sample of Italian awarding procedures for roadwork contracts in the period 2009-2015. Then, it validates the efficacy of the indicators through measures of direct corruption risks (judiciary cases and police investigations for corruption-related crimes) and indirect corruption risks (delays and cost overruns). From a policy perspective, our analysis shows that the most effective red flags in detecting corruption risks are those related to discretionary mechanisms for selecting private contractors (such as the most economically advantageous offer or negotiated procedures), compliance with the minimum time limit for the submission of tenders and subcontracting. Moreover, our analysis suggests that greater standardization in the call for tender documents can contribute to reducing corruption risks. From a methodological point of view, the paper highlights the relevance of prediction approaches based on machine learning methods (especially the random forests algorithm) for validating a large set of indicators.

Keywords: public procurement; corruption; red flags (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D44 D47 H57 R42 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-big, nep-cmp, nep-cta, nep-eur and nep-reg
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.bancaditalia.it/pubblicazioni/qef/2020-0544/QEF_544_20.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bdi:opques:qef_544_20

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Questioni di Economia e Finanza (Occasional Papers) from Bank of Italy, Economic Research and International Relations Area Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().