The Transition of the Visegrad Countries Toward Sustainable Public Procurement

ABSTRACT

This paper aims to examine the impact of the inclusion of sustainability aspects in the evaluation criteria in public tenders on the performance of small and medium-sized enterprises in the public procurement market of the Visegrad Countries. Using data on more than 30,000 contract award notices from Tenders Electronic Daily, we found a positive effect of sustainability aspects in the evaluation criteria on SMEs bidding. However, even though SMEs won more than three-quarters of all contracts in the dataset, they obtained just over half of the total financial value of all contracts.

KEYWORDS:

• SMEs
• most economically advantageous tender
• sustainable public procurement

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• H57
• G18
• O38
• C30

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Directive 2014/24/EU on public procurement, Directive 2014/25/EU on procurement by entities operating in the water, energy, transport and postal services sectors, and Directive 2014/23/EU on the award of concession contracts

2. https://data.europa.eu/euodp/en/data/dataset/ted-csv

3. As defined in Commission Recommendation 2003/361/EC, the term SMEs includes all firms with less than 250 employees and whose annual turnover does not exceed 50 million euros, and/or an annual balance sheet total does not exceed 43 million euros.

4. In the case of regressions on sub-samples of contracts that use aspects of sustainability within the evaluation criteria, the Sustainable aspects variable determining the specific aspect of sustainability would be used instead of this variable.

5. See footnote above.

Additional information

Funding

Research was funded by scientific grant VEGA [1/0619/19]: Experimental inquiry on economic agents’ propensity to tax evasion.