Transparency Meets Efficiency: The Case of Public Procurement in the Czech Republic

Abstract

This article focuses on transparency and contract publication in public procurement. Our main objective is to identify statistical associations between situations when a resulting contract is not publicly available and the outcomes of the procurement, esp. efficiency. By merging multiple databases and web scraping, we have created a unique dataset covering nearly 14,000 public procurements in the Czech Republic during the period 2018-2020. This dataset and recent legislation enable us to run empirical tests of new hypotheses, as well as control for variables already established in the empirical literature, such as procurement type, regime and authority. The results of our quantitative econometric models show that for selected types of projects, the unavailability of the contract is associated with smaller price savings as well as with more frequent single bid outcomes. For all types of projects, we found that failure to publish project prices is positively associated with single bid outcomes.