Comparative Analysis of the European Centralised Public Procurement

Abstract When analysing centralised public procurement models and solutions from the public administration point of view, attention needs to be paid to the specific features of public procurement as well as the institutional characteristics of the major central procurement organisations. In this paper, central procurement organisations in 11 European countries were compared based on interviews according to their activities, market positions and institutional characteristics. We shall address the issue of efficiency and stability of organisational structures by comparing the practice of the Central and Eastern European (CEE) and non-CEE European Countries. This comparison analyses the differences of the countries’ centralised public procurement structures and reveals the diversity of analytic criteria, underlining that the legal regulatory background to public procurement is not necessarily predominant in determining specific features and characteristics. The stability and market-oriented characteristics of a centralised public procurement system have an impact on the innovativeness of central purchasing bodies (CPBs) and on the development of their service provider nature, which should be taken into account by the CEE countries with a less-developed public procurement culture.