7(34)
A comprehensive literature survey was published by the Australian Industry
Commission (1996), based on more than 200 studies. Not all of the studies
collected are restricted to gains from public procurement—some deal with
more comprehensive change such as partial or complete outsourcing—but
the majority of the studies do. The Commission reports a wide spectrum
of gains, ranging from 50 percent to negative values. More than half of the
studies lie in the interval between 10 and 30 percent, however, and the
grand average is about 20 percent.
A more recent, less comprehensive survey by Keisler and Buehring (2009)
confirms the difficulties associated with defining a counterfactual situation.
Apart from these surveys, there exist a number of studies of particular
sectors and countries. Arnek (2002) provides a detailed analysis of the
savings made in connection with exposing the production unit at the
Swedish National Road Agency to competition, yielding an interval between
22 and 27 percent. This is a theoretical estimate, however; the realized
potential turned out to be 13 percent. Duncombe and Searcy (2007) report
savings in New York school districts of the order of 4 percent from using
recommended procurement practices. Ohashi (2009) estimates the effects
of increased transparency in a prefecture in Japan to be up to 8 percent.
As for the EU level, Europe Economics, a London-based consultancy firm,
provides two estimates of the benefits from procurement rules in the EU in
studies commissioned by the EU administration (Europe Economics 2006,
2011). In the 2006 report, the authors estimate the increase in value for
money from the introduction of procurement directives in the 15 member
states between 1992 and 2003 to be between 2.5 and 10 percent. In its
report in 2011, Europe Economics not only estimates the general gains but
also specifies the relative importance of the most important components
(transparency, openness, etc.). General savings are estimated to be of the
order of a few percent compared with the ―Initial Estimated Total Value‖,
which is basically what the procuring entity believed at the outset that the
project in question would cost. This measures the procuring entities’ ability
to forecast costs rather than actual savings, however, and does not seem
to be particularly useful for policy purposes.
