Search results

"Defence procurement in Canada is a mess, with hundreds of millions of dollars being routinely wasted, despite which the Canadian Armed Forces is woefully underequipped and lacking crucial capacity. Charlie Foxtrot shows why past governments failed so spectacularly to efficiently equip and manage the CAF, and how to change that."--

We show how to numerically solve for a Markov‐perfect equilibrium of a dynamic auction game where a procurer repeatedly purchases construction services from capacity‐constrained firms. We find that the procurer is best off scheduling frequent auctions for small project sizes. Otherwise, firm capacity utilization rates become larger and more asymmetric, which softens competition and increases procurement costs. We also find that forward‐looking bidding dampens the competition‐softening effects of asymmetry: farsighted firms compete more intensely than myopic ones. This can undermine the goal of a bid‐preference‐style affirmative action program: more farsighted firms respond less to the asymmetry induced via bid preferences.

In the energy trilemma of reliability, sustainability and affordability, politicians treat reliability as over-riding. The EU assumes the energy-only Target Electricity Model will deliver reliability but the UK argues that a capacity remuneration mechanism is needed. This paper argues that capacity auctions tend to over-procure capacity, exacerbating the missing money problem they were designed to address. The bias is further exacerbated by failing to address some of the missing market problems also neglected in the debate. It examines the case for, criticisms of, and outcome of the first GB capacity auction and problems of trading between different capacity markets. ; This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Elsevier via http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.enpol.2015.10.028

This PhD thesis looks at one of the most crucial determinants of state formation, quality of institutions, and social equality: institutionalised grand corruption. Institutionalised grand corruption denotes the particularistic allocation of public resources, that is violating prior explicit rules in order to benefit a closed network while denying access to all others. Emphasizing access to power and public resources deviates from traditional definitions of corruption resting on individual wrongdoing and abuse of power. The thesis makes use of large amounts of administrative data describing public procurement tenders on transaction level and links it to data on company ownership, financial accounts, and political office of company owners. By using data mining techniques it breaks away from standard, and arguably deficient, measures of quality of institutions and corruption. It proposes a complex 'blueprint' for measuring institutionalized grand corruption in the allocation of public resources and applies its key elements to three Central and Eastern European countries: Czech Republic, Hungary, and Slovakia. It is emphasized that these cases are only 'pilot' measurements, the blueprint is applicable to practically every high and middle income country, data is typically going back in time for 6-8 years. Using such a novel indicator set allows for an unprecedented detail of analysis. Results highlight the role played by European Union Structural and Cohesion Funds in increasing the prevalence of institutionalised grand corruption. This is due to at least two factors, first, they provide additional public resources available for corrupt rent extraction; second, they change the motivations for and controls of corruption. In Czech Republic, Hungary, and Slovakia, the first effect increases the value of particularistic resource allocation by up to 1.21% of GDP, while the second effect decreases it by up to 0.03% of GDP. The latter effect is entirely driven by Slovakia; in Czech Republic and Hungary even this effect increases particularism. ; European Union and the Hungarian Government: TAMOP 4.2.2.B and ANTICORRP (Grant agreement no: 290529)

This book presents effective strategies for developing countries to transform their demand for manufactured imports into a tool for technology transfer, enhancing absorption capacity and development, paying particular attention to how national procurement policies can be geared towards assisting technological development. The technology transfer is considered one of the crucial and complicated challenges for the development efforts of these countries, which are characterized by insufficient infrastructure and superstructure and high levels of imports of manufactured goods, both of which requir

Membership in the European Union implies adjustment of EU projects to the rules of Structural Funds, but also adoption of legal regulations, thus influencing the process of implementation of the public procurement in EU funded projects. Each successful applicant who expressed the need for procurement of goods, services and works of a certain value, must respect the principles of public procurement. Irregularities in the procurement process can lead to the failure of returning the EU funds even several years after the end of the project. Therefore, the knowledge and proper implementation of public procurement is the main precondition for the correct implementation of each project. In order to obtain information about the current absorption capacity of the public procurement liable parties, and to identify key obstacles that stakeholders face in procurement procedures, the research was conducted by surveying 30 entities that are subject of public procurement in Croatia. Research results imply the poor quality of public procurement in the implemented projects, which often results in financial corrections, disapproving project reports, etc.

Is it possible to generate more efficient outcomes with respect to public procurement in general and defense acquisition in particular? Or are cost overruns inevitable when it comes to major engineering projects, like the development of modern weaponry? In this article, we draw on a unique data set of nearly 50 French armaments contracts in order to examine how one government has reformed its defense acquisition process over the past twenty years. Beginning in the early 1990s, France embarked on a series of policy reforms that enabled the state to contain skyrocketing weapons costs. We emphasize three, inter-related aspects of the defense acquisition environment in France that favored cost containment: first, hard budget constraints; second, the great technical capacity that the French government brought to bear on the weapons acquisition process, coupled with its iterative relationship with a small number of suppliers; and third, the use of contracting techniques that empowered project managers.

AbstractThis article examines a problem faced by a firm procuring a material input or good from a set of suppliers. The cost to procure the material from any given supplier is concave in the amount ordered from the supplier, up to a supplier‐specific capacity limit. This NP‐hard problem is further complicated by the observation that capacities are often uncertain in practice, due for instance to production shortages at the suppliers, or competition from other firms. We accommodate this uncertainty in a worst‐case (robust) fashion by modeling an adversarial entity (which we call the "follower") with a limited procurement budget. The follower reduces supplier capacity to maximize the minimum cost required for our firm to procure its required goods. To guard against uncertainty, the firm can "protect" any supplier at a cost (e.g., by signing a contract with the supplier that guarantees supply availability, or investing in machine upgrades that guarantee the supplier's ability to produce goods at a desired level), ensuring that the anticipated capacity of that supplier will indeed be available. The problem we consider is thus a three‐stage game in which the firm first chooses which suppliers' capacities to protect, the follower acts next to reduce capacity from unprotected suppliers, and the firm then satisfies its demand using the remaining capacity. We formulate a three‐stage mixed‐integer program that is well‐suited to decomposition techniques and develop an effective cutting‐plane algorithm for its solution. The corresponding algorithmic approach solves a sequence of scaled and relaxed problem instances, which enables solving problems having much larger data values when compared to standard techniques. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2013

AbstractSupply chains are often characterized by the presence of a dominant buyer purchasing from a supplier with limited capacity. We study such a situation where a single supplier sells capacity to an established and more powerful buyer and also to a relatively less powerful buyer. The more powerful buyer enjoys the first right to book her capacity requirements at supplier's end, and then the common supplier fulfills the requirement of the less powerful buyer. We find that when the supplier's capacity is either too low (below the lower threshold) or too high (above the higher threshold), there is no excess procurement as compared to the case when supplier has infinite capacity. When the supplier's capacity is between these two thresholds, the more powerful buyer purchases an excess amount in comparison to the infinite capacity case.

Public procurement expenditures of European Union (EU) member states are enormous, accounting for approximately 14 per cent of value creation in the EU. In many European countries, municipalities are responsible for a large share of these expenditures, as is the case in Germany. By integrating sustainability criteria in tenders for goods, works and services, municipalities can significantly contribute to Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 12 of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, which is to ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns.Sustainable public procurement (SPP) practices are, however, the exception rather than the rule. While environmental criteria are increasingly considered, social standards have thus far been considered far less in public tenders. Thus, we analysed what could be done to support the implementation of Socially Responsible Public Procurement (SRPP) practices in German municipalities.Our empirical evidence shows that there is no gold standard for implementing SRPP in municipal contexts. Figure 1 presents a map with different entry points from which practitioners and policy-makers may embark on fitting pathways. We recommend measures in the following three dimensions.Regulatory dimension: Regulations and their "translation" for administrative bodies should be ambitious and clear. The regulatory framework on the municipal level should clearly specify how SPP is introduced and implemented, especially by defining concrete SPP goals and translating goals and policies for civil servants.Institutional dimension: The basis for effective SPP measures is a strategic procurement organisation. Municipal stakeholders may take action in three areas to make procurement organisation more strategic. First, decision-makers can attach a higher value to procurement as an instrument to realise the strategic goals of the municipality. Second, a huge variety of procurement instruments is applicable to support this value shift. Third, due to the decentralised procurement structures in municipalities, coordination and communication between departments and persons should be streamlined, or municipal procurement should become more centralised.Individual dimension: Information and capacity building should be offered to all stakeholders. In order to adjust regulatory and institutional conditions for effective SRPP implementation, support from administration and political decision-makers on all levels is a prerequisite. Providing customised information and offering capacity building can raise the level of support. In this regard, SRPP is most likely to be achieved when specific staff is assigned responsibility for its implementation.Based on insights from German municipalities, this paper outlines further success factors and underlying triggers to utilise public procurement in the transformation towards sustainability.