Public Spending Research Articles

Distributional justice, effectiveness, and costs of current and alternative solar PV incentive schemes in Switzerland

Like many other countries, Switzerland offers various incentives to promote residential solar PV, but not all households have equal access to them. Using a microsimulation approach based on merged data from the Swiss Household Budget Survey and Household Energy Demand Survey, we evaluate the current Swiss incentive scheme in terms of how equally the internal rates of return of PV installations, the amounts of obtainable incentives, and the saving months to accumulate the investment are distributed across households. The current, regionally heterogeneous scheme is then compared with alternative, nationally uniform designs based on the required public spending, effectiveness in promoting profitable and affordable PV, and distributional equality. The current scheme leads to a large disparity in the economic profitability of installations and incentive amounts obtainable across various socio-demographics. Larger, the highest-income, and rural households can obtain more incentives and install more profitable PV systems. Lower-income households must save the longest to install PV. Incentive schemes with a nationally uniform investment grant or a feed-in tariff threshold could offer a good alternative to the current scheme in terms of justice, public spending, and effectiveness. The insights on heterogeneous versus uniform PV incentives and the developed methodology could be transferred elsewhere.

A New Approach to Public Contracting of Sustainable Construction Using Innovation Partnership

Sustainable public procurement of construction projects is a key objective to fulfill the targets of the EU Green Deal, the new Regulation approved by the European Parliament, and the conditions required by the Facility of Recovery and Resilience approved by EU. However, most of the adopted procedures are based on traditional procedures, open competition, or restricted procedures, which are not appropriate for developing an innovative approach aiming for more ambitious sustainable objectives. Innovation partnership is a new procedure introduced by the EU Directives of Public Procurement of 2014 ( Article 31º of 2014/24/UE), and it has been discussed and applied to the development of new products but, unfortunately, its potential has not been studied as a tool to prepare and to award more innovative and sustainable contracts of public works. This is the objective of the research presented in this paper, and a set of guidelines is deduced and discussed to support public contracting authorities to make better use of innovation partnerships.

Indiana's Public Health Investment Holds Insights For Other States.

Indiana has a business-friendly environment, but historical underinvestment in public health has yielded poor health outcomes. In 2023, when trust in governmental public health was strained nationwide, Indiana increased public health spending by 1,500percent. In this article, we explain how Indiana achieved this unprecedented legislative victory for public health, describing the context, approach, and lessons learned. Specifically, an Indiana University report linking economic vitality and overall health sparked the creation of a governor's commission charged with exploring ways to address Indiana's shortcomings. Working with the Indiana Department of Health, the commission developed multisectoral coalitions and business and government partnerships, and it maintained consistent and coordinated communication with policy makers. Lessons learned included the value of uncoupling public health from partisan narratives, appointing diverse commission membership with strategically selected cochairs, involving local leaders, and ensuring local decision-making control. We believe that Indiana's approach holds insights for other states interested in strengthening public health funding in the current era.

Inclusive Public Procurement

Inclusive Public Procurement

The Possibility of the Contracting Authority to Establish Qualification, Selection, and Award Criteria for the Award of Public Procurement Contracts

The Possibility of the Contracting Authority to Establish Qualification, Selection, and Award Criteria for the Award of Public Procurement Contracts

Exploring Ethics in South African Municipal Procurement: Professionalism, Compliance, and Ethical Dimensions Interface

Abstract The local government is close to the people who thus, heavily rely on it for basic needs, a legislative imperative enshrined in the supreme law of the Republic of South Africa, the Constitution of 1996. Its purpose is to supply goods and services and encourage the participation of citizens in the realisation of policy objectives. This paper is one-third of a three-series composition sought through a conceptual and theoretical perspective to interrogate the ethical dimensions in which the public service exists within the interface of professionalism and compliance with municipal procurement processes and procedures. While the local sphere of government is crucial in the democratization and intensification of mass participation, there has been a rise in incidents of corruption and fraud, fruitless and wasteful expenditure, and the misuse and misdirection of funds, which gradually erode public trust. This paper employed an interpretivism paradigm and a qualitative approach, and it relied on secondary data The paper found that the erosion of public trust leads to citizens violently protesting, demanding better service delivery and that service delivery is likely to decline when funds are misappropriated since municipalities rely on the procurement of goods and services to initiate public service delivery. Furthermore, the paper found while South Africa has sound, comprehensive and clear legislative policy frameworks that regulate public procurement; implementation remains a challenge.

Efficiency of local public spending in Cameroon: Does population size matter?

AbstractPromoting decentralization is currently high on the global agenda. To date, the existing literature in the African context, and more specifically in Cameroon, has not established a link between the size of local authorities and the efficiency of their infrastructure spending. This study therefore attempts to fill this gap in the literature by empirically examining the effect of population size on the efficiency of local public spending in Cameroon. Using the two‐stage Data Envelopment Analysis model on a sample of 100 communes for the period 2017–2020 to estimate composite efficiency scores and the censored Tobit model to determine the effect of population size on the efficiency of local public spending, the results show that population size and density positively and very significantly affect the efficiency of local public spending. In light of these results, we recommend that the state make population size the main allocation key for transfers and subsidies to local authorities and that communes organize themselves into inter‐municipalities to benefit from economies of scale and curb spillover effects.

Tax Reforms and Their Effect on Social Inequality

Fiscal policy obeys an axis of government management to guide economic and social investments where the general good prevails; recognizing that taxation is a mechanism that guarantees public spending. The objective of this reflection article is to describe the characteristics of the tax reforms and their effect on social inequality. For this, a documentary review was carried out from 30 documents selected with inclusion criteria; showing that inequality is multifactorial in nature and arises from the nation's inability to allocate income based on social investment. Finally, it was concluded that the reforms in their tax essence have a greater footprint of tax evasion and a clear impact on salary inequality that targets the less favored classes. For its part, the novelty is reflected with the approach of a particular analysis regarding the concept of social inequality.

Natural versus artificial herd immunity: Is vaccine research investment always optimal?

Under the threat of a rapid expanding virus like the 2020 COVID-19, policy-makers need to decide relatively fast whether and under which conditions to invest in a vaccine, and eventually adopt other protective measures like social distancing or lockdowns, or to wait for natural herd immunity. Taking into account that vaccines take time to be fully developed and effective, this paper considers a unified framework at the crossroad between economics and epidemiology to study optimal public spending in medical research to obtain a vaccine against an infectious disease evolving according to a SIR dynamics. We prove that developed economies always invest in the search of a vaccine. The more individuals care about consumption, the more they actually reduce their current consumption and the more they invest in the vaccine research program to recover their consumption potential at the earliest. Our model would only recommend economies with very poor technology to restrain from investment and wait for herd immunity.

Investigating Ethics in Government Procurement: A Bibliometric Analysis

Investigating Ethics in Government Procurement: A Bibliometric Analysis

The Impact of Information Technology Adoption on Efficiency and Transparency in Public Procurement Processes in Kenya

The Impact of Information Technology Adoption on Efficiency and Transparency in Public Procurement Processes in Kenya

The Member States in the EU Food System: National Regulatory Options for Sustainable Food Offer, Food Consumption and Food Environments

AbstractThe Framework for Sustainable Food Systems law will either not be published at all or after a long delay. Whereas the first part of the article constructs an empirical and theoretical underpinning about why the EU Member States should therefore act on food sustainability, the second part focuses on what legal measures Member States can take.In the first part, leaning on food systems thinking, we argue that in the absence of EU action in the matter, the Member States remain the most potent lever for taking regulatory action on addressing sustainability in the food system.In the second part, the article provides an exploratory study of potential national legal instruments for making domestic food systems more sustainable, with an emphasis on the regulation of offer and consumption of foods and food environments. The article discusses the following legal instruments in the context of EU law and Member States’ room for action, with examples from a comparative perspective: public procurement purchasing by governments, product composition requirements, fiscal measures, non-fiscal pricing instruments, labelling & certification, marketing, and the regulation of private and public food environments. The article further concludes that it may prove useful to better enshrine the food sustainability paradigm in law at national level.

PENGARUH SUKU BUNGA, EKSPOR, DAN PERTUMBUHAN EKONOMI TERHADAP TINGKAT INFLASI DI INDONESIA

Inflation has always been a major concern of governments in the world, especially in developing countries like Indonesia, as an economic issue. The study aims to study how economic growth, exports, and interest rates impacted inflation rates during the period 1993-2022. Interest rates, exports, and economic growth are used as free variables, and inflation is used as bound variables. In this study, the analysis method is a double linear regression analysis. The results show that export value has a significant positive influence on inflation, while interest rates and economic growth have a significant negative influence upon inflation. Reducing aggregate economic demand, which can suppress inflationary pressures, is a way to control interest rates. To suppress inflation during economic growth, tax policies can be used to reduce public spending or raise taxes.

Exploring Wagner's Law in India: An Empirical Study of Economic Growth and Public Expenditure

In this research paper, we test the connections between public spending and economic growth in India by employing annual data from 1981-82 till 2019-20. We examine if there is a long-run relation between public spending and economic growth and then we try to understand the direction of causality between them by using six versions of Wagner's law along with an augmented version. The paper employs tests of stationarity, cointegration, granger causality and the vector error correction model for the analysis in all the versions. Results from these tests show that only some versions give support to validate Wagners' law in India over the sample period studied.

The Main Directions of Supranational Regulation of the Digital Space in the EAEU at the Present Stage

Introduction. The study of the main directions of supranational regulation of the digital space is an important task in the context of the constant complication and expansion of social relations in the digital sphere. The creation of effective and progressive regulation in the relevant area can become the basis for increasing the competitiveness of the EAEU on the world stage. At the same time, the corresponding issues have been practically not studied in the domestic academic literature. Within the framework of this article, an attempt has been made to comprehensively assess the system of supranational regulation of the digital space in the EAEU, to identify its strengths and weaknesses.Materials and methods. The methodological basis of the study was made up of general scientific and special scientific methods. General scientific methods are presented: analysis, synthesis, inductive-deductive method, systematic method. Special scientific methods include: the method of systemic analysis of law, the comparative legal method, the formal legal method. The research materials are presented by supranational acts of the EAEU (primarily the Treaty on the EAEU and its protocols), official documents and statements, as well as doctrinal concepts and approaches.Results of the study. The article analyzes and evaluates the key areas of supranational regulation of the digital space in the EAEU at the present stage. The conceptual and legal foundations of the relevant regulation are identified (including in comparison with the EU approach to supranational regulation of the digital space) and their role and significance for the development of supranational regulation of the digital space in the EAEU is analyzed. Changes in the customs legislation of the EAEU in terms of supranational regulation of external (with the participation of residents of third countries) electronic trade are involved in scientific circulation.Discussion and conclusion. Based on the results of the study, it was concluded that currently the system of supranational regulation of the digital space in the EAEU is at the stage of its formation and extends only to four main areas: the circulation of non-personal data, public procurement, intellectual property protection and external electronic commerce. At the same time, recent initiatives in the field of supranational regulation of external electronic commerce represent an important step towards a new stage in the development of digital aspects of Eurasian integration.

Utility of Scenarios in Understanding Public Procurements Conducted in Theatres of Operations

Currently, operational logistics is a significant challenge: to resupply Romanian forces located in various theatres around the world. Involvement in an international mission is contingent not solely on the mission’s nature or the structures of the assumed forces but also on the requisites and logistical capabilities for supplying goods and services within the designated area. The international security environment is challenging. Political tension, military conflicts and economic problems have intensified security concerns. In this context, organizing the procurement processes efficiently is a major preoccupation for specialists. Moreover, the legal framework for public procurement opens up room for different issues. Given the multinational context and specific procurement regulations, the execution of procurements within operational theatres is exposed to distinct challenges compared to those encountered in the national territory. In this complex and ambiguous environment, understanding the legal means of addressing challenges in the procurement field is desirable. Moreover, considering the importance of procuring goods and services to achieve the mission goal, a proficient procurement specialist is a crucial asset. In this regard, the main objective of this study is to demonstrate that Scenario-Based Learning could be transformed into a useful tool for preparing future specialists in procurement.

Risk mitigation in urban bus concession contracts: Overcoming uncertainties with a real options model

In this paper, we analyzed a risk-sharing mechanism that can be used in urban bus public service contracts (PSC) to deal with demand uncertainty in the upcoming years. This mechanism is similar to a collar option: an MRG (Minimum Revenue Guarantee) combined with a revenue cap. We applied this mechanism to a case study, the Lisbon Metro Area bus contracts. We compared the chosen model (a gross cost contract) with a simulated scenario modeled as a collar option. To develop this scenario, we model the flexibilities applying Real options Analysis and the project uncertainty as a Geometric Brownian Motion (GBM). The calculations were performed using Monte Carlo simulation. The results show that, compared to the gross cost, the collar option model allows the private operator to benefit from a potential demand increase. In the case of a downturn, the loss is shared between the two sides, reducing the contract cost borne by the government. Furthermore, from a public policy perspective, contrary to the gross cost model, this model may incentivize the private partner to improve service quality as a strategy to increase demand and, consequently, revenues. In addition, if demand evolves in a different trend, the financial rebalance is made automatically, reducing litigation costs for both sides.

Exploring value creation from an ecosystem perspective: A critical examination of social procurement policy

IMPACT Public procurement policy reforms, and specifically social procurement practices designed to support the social economy and create social value, are growing in popularity. However, there is still limited knowledge around the extent to which rhetorical aims of procurement reforms are perceived to be realized through the implementation of social procurement policies. This research provides important insights for social procurement advocates and, in particular, for policy-makers and public managers working at all levels of government. The authors highlight how reforms in Scotland have seemingly benefited the social economy by tangibly directing significant spend toward social economy organizations and changing societal and individual beliefs about their social and economic value. At the same time, there are still barriers to value creation at organizational and individual levels. These findings are important for those attempting to strengthen their social procurement policies and encourage collaboration in a way that advantages actors working across the public service ecosystem.

Utilitatea metodei scenariului în înțelegerea achizițiilor publice derulate în teatrele de operații

Currently, operational logistics is a significant challenge: to resupply Romanian forces located in various theatres around the world. Involvement in an international mission is contingent not solely on the mission’s nature or the structures of the assumed forces but also on the requisites and logistical capabilities for supplying goods and services within the designated area. The international security environment is challenging. Political tension, military conflicts and economic problems have intensified security concerns. In this context, organizing the procurement processes efficiently is a major preoccupation for specialists. Moreover, the legal framework for public procurement opens up room for different issues. Given the multinational context and specific procurement regulations, the execution of procurements within operational theatres is exposed to distinct challenges compared to those encountered in the national territory. In this complex and ambiguous environment, understanding the legal means of addressing challenges in the procurement field is desirable. Moreover, considering the importance of procuring goods and services to achieve the mission goal, a proficient procurement specialist is a crucial asset. In this regard, the main objective of this study is to demonstrate that Scenario-Based Learning could be transformed into a useful tool for preparing future specialists in procurement.

THE CASE OF LEBANON BANKRUPTCY

Default can be defined as the country’s inability to repay its debts. The accumulation of debts and the country’s inability to repay them can happen for many reasons such as political and economic instability, wars, wrong governmental policies, or pandemics. The default of a country means the depreciation of the currency, an increase in the inflation rate, increasing interest rates, lack of foreign and domestic investments, and increasing unemployment. In addition, the government cut public spending and stopped the public projects and funding the social programs. Lebanon became unable to repay its debts in the year 2020. Lebanon’s default happened due to several reasons. The purpose of the paper is to explain the reasons that led Lebanon to declare its default. Adding to that, this paper will discuss the main recommendations and policies that can be implemented for Lebanon to be able to get out of its economic crisis.