Scaling behavior of public procurement activity
Journal
PLOS ONE
ISSN
1932-6203
Date Issued
2021
Author(s)
António Curado
Bruno Damásio
Sara Encarnação
Flávio L. Pinheiro
Type
Resource Types::text::journal::journal article
URL Institutional Repository
Abstract
Public procurement refers to the purchase by public sector entities—such as government departments or local authorities—of Services, Goods, or Works. It accounts for a significant share of OECD countries’ expenditures. However, while governments are expected to execute them as efficiently as possible, there is a lack of methodologies for an adequate comparison of procurement activity between institutions at different scales, which represents a challenge for policymakers and academics. Here, we propose using methods borrowed from urban scaling laws literature to study public procurement activity among 278 Portuguese municipalities between 2011 and 2018. We find that public procurement expenditure scales sublinearly with population size, indicating an economy of scale for public spending as cities increase their population size. Moreover, when looking at the municipal Scale-Adjusted Indicators (the deviations from the scaling law) by contract categories—Works, Goods, and Services—we are able to identify a richer local characterisation of municipalities based on the similarity of procurement activity. These results make up a framework for quantitatively studying local public expenditure by enabling policymakers a more appropriate foundation for comparative analysis.
Dataset(s)
Dataset - Scaling behavior of public procurement activity
Subjects
innovation
;
impacts
;
laws
;
city planning
;
financing, government
;
health expenditures
;
humans
;
portugal
;
public sector
;
urbanization
;
article
;
city
;
population size
;
public expenditure
;
quantitative analysis
;
city planning
;
financial management
;
health care cost
;
human
;
legislation and jurisprudence
;
portugal
;
public sector
;
urbanization