Does decentralising public procurement affect the quality of governance? Evidence from local government in Europe

Andreas Kyriacou and Oriol Roca-Sagalés

Local Government Studies, 2021, vol. 47, issue 2, 208-233

Abstract: In this article, we consider the impact on the quality of governance when assigning public procurement spending to local authorities. While fiscal decentralisation is generally expected to yield improvements in governance because it empowers better informed voters and public officials who can tailor policies to local needs, we hypothesise that the expected benefits may not emerge when decentralising public procurement because this may facilitate rent-seeking by special interests and because it would potentially forego economies of scale, organisational benefits and spillover effects. Consistent with this, our empirical evidence, based on a sample of 30 European countries over the period 1996 to 2015, shows that decentralising public procurement down to the local level does not promote good governance. Our evidence is robust to the introduction of different checks and specifications and shows that the impact of decentralisation on governance depends on the nature of the spending category decentralised.

Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/03003930.2020.1729749 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:taf:flgsxx:v:47:y:2021:i:2:p:208-233

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/flgs20

DOI: 10.1080/03003930.2020.1729749

Access Statistics for this article

Local Government Studies is currently edited by Helen Hancock

More articles in Local Government Studies from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().