When municipalities go shopping—Portuguese direct awards

Abstract

A direct award allows a public sector entity to contract with a supplier of goods and services and accelerates most procedures associated with public contracts. Direct awards are used by many European municipalities and are the subject of much debate. This paper looks at the value of direct awards in Portugal. Employing classification and regression tree (CART) analysis, the author concludes that, in European countries, direct awards are the most efficient solution for small, current expenses; however, larger projects should be subject to public competition.

Keywords:

• Direct awards
• Portugal
• public expenditure

Acknowledgements

The author is grateful to Public Money & Management's two anonymous referees for their useful suggestions regarding a previous version of this paper. The author is also indebted to Joaquim dos Santos Teixeira for his work on data collection. Remaining errors and limitations are author's responsibility.

Notes

*Other statistics are available on request from the author, including validation statistics (nodes, validation cost, validation standard error), proportion of variance explained, mean squared error and mean absolute percentage error.