18 novembre 2011 Elena Podkolzina : Cross regional comparison of the efficiency of public procurement in Russia

Co-authors: Anna Balsevich, Svetlana Pivovarova

Abstract:Although the vast majority of public procurement in Russia is performed under one Federal Law the implementation and enforcement of the law varies from region to region. In this paper we study the impact of regional institutional environment on the procurement price variation for a standardized good: gasoline. The difference between the price of the public contract and the retail price of the simple search good (gasoline) is considered as an indicator of system efficiency. We focus our research agenda on finding possible dependence of relative price variation not only on the institutional factors such as the level of information transparency in the system, government stability, quality of the legislative system etc., but also on the market characteristics such as the level of competition, and the characteristics of the procurement such as the volume and duration of the contract, type of the purchase procedure, and the type of delivery mechanism. We show that along with the contract duration, type of the procedure, and the level of competition, level of procurement information transparency and percept corruption in the region have significant effect on the relative price of the contract.

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