Decentralization and Public Procurement Performance: New Evidence from Italy

Olga Chiappinelli

EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters, 2020, vol. 58, issue 2, 856-880

Abstract: We exploit a new dataset based on European Union (EU) procurement award notices to investigate the relationship between the degree of centralization of public procurement and its performance. We focus on the case of Italy, where all levels of government, along with a number of other public institutions, are involved in procurement and are subject to the same EU regulation. We find that (a) municipalities and utilities, which currently award among the largest shares of contracts, achieve lower rebates than other institutional categories; and (b) decentralization implies lower rebates only when it comes with weak competences of procurement officials. The evidence seems to suggest that a reorganization of the procurement system, both in terms of partial centralization and increased professionalization of procurement officials, would help improve award-stage procurement performance.

JEL-codes: H11 H57 H71 H77 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/232013/1/C ... 20Procurement_VV.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: DECENTRALIZATION AND PUBLIC PROCUREMENT PERFORMANCE: NEW EVIDENCE FROM ITALY (2020)
Working Paper: Decentralization and Public Procurement Performance: New Evidence from Italy (2017)
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:zbw:espost:232013

DOI: 10.1111/ecin.12871

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters from ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().