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In our Assessment of European Procurement Around Covid report, we sought to determine the extent to which different countries relied on direct contract awards, those contracts that were let without any competitive process. Research* has previously indicated that contracts that were let by direct awards are 10% more expensive than those let by competitive processes. Direct awards are ...

We are pleased today to launch our latest report, An Assessment of European Procurement Around Covid. The first wave of Covid-19 in Spring 2020, brought about unprecedented stresses and challenges to modern public procurement systems. To remove barriers and ensure the fact procurement of critical goods, governments throughout European states implemented emergency procurement regulations. These regulations generally ...

Recently, we published a very important data set. All known government medical equipment and protective clothing contracts were published and can be found here. This data updates daily and is completely free for anyone who wants to monitor government contracts. Since 12th October there has been a significant rise in the number of contracts for Covid related ...

-Fiona Hunt. This simple graph gives us a fascinating insight into the respective size of government spending globally. From the recent report by Open Contracting Partnership and Spend Network, on quantifying global spend, this graph illustrates the dominance of the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, and China)when it comes to government spending, making up 40% of annual ...

The Open Contracting Report 'Global Procurement Spend', is to our knowledge, the most comprehensive study of global public procurement yet. We are proud to be the data partner for the project, analysing more than 7 million documents to quantify the $12.9trn size of public procurement, globally. So, you’re probably wondering how we put a number on it? Our ...

Why are we looking at procurement globally, when collaboration between countries is so difficult? Ian Makgill, Founder, Spend Network Analysing public procurement on a global scale is, in one sense, hiding to nothing. After all, how useful is it to directly compare contracting in Bejing with contracts let in Bourdeaux? The nature of public administration in both ...

Ian Makgill, Alex Yeung, Lindsey Marchessault  We often hear about the scale of public procurement. With vast sums of money at stake, it is important that the public procurement market is fair, efficient, and effective. However, it has been many years since anyone has actually quantified its annual global value. Thus far, there has been no attempt to ...

  Looking at the data on tenders over the past twelve months gives some insight into the ways that different governments are operating during the crisis. Looking at the twelve largest economies in Europe, we've been able to see how buyers have changed their buying practices since the start of the year. From the chart above it is ...

-Ian Makgill, Founder, Spend Network What's the right price for PPE gowns and masks? With every Government in the world yanking hard on the same supply chains, prices have increased significantly. The UK Government has made it clear that they're willing to do what they can to get the equipment they need to protect NHS staff. We've written ...

  Looking at the data on tenders over the past twelve months gives some insight into the ways that different governments are operating during the crisis. Looking at the twelve largest economies in Europe, we've been able to see how buyers have changed their buying practices since the start of the year. From the chart above it is ...

This article is the second part of a three part series on competitive tendering in public procurement in Europe. There is a correlation between competitive tendering in public procurement and value for money as well as broader, positive procurement outcomes (e.g. contract completion on time, in full). As before, data was extracted from Tenders Electronic Daily ...

In this series of articles, we will explore how competitive the overall public procurement tendering process is for European countries. The most value for money in public procurement is linked to a competitive tendering process. This means encouraging multiple bidders to present offers. There are many ways to do this, all of which have a demonstrable ...