Profiling a methodology for economic growth and convergence: learning from the EU e-procurement experience for central and eastern European countries [An article from: Technovation]

This digital document is a journal article from Technovation, published by Elsevier in 2005. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Media Library immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Description:
Recent improvements in Internet technology connectivity provide an opportunity to make procurement for goods and services more transparent and efficient. When used for public procurement, information technology can be utilized as a mean to achieve the main principles of perfect competition, namely, access to information, no barriers to entry (transparency), and a large number of participants in market exchange. In this paper, we argue that the electronic procurement, particularly in the public domain, is an effective policy tool to establish the fundamentals of market economy and hence increase country's productivity, remove domestic barriers to international trade, and improve efficiency. The main focus of this paper is to examine the efforts of European Union to transform the procurement process to a more cost-effective and innovative process. Moreover, our goal is to demonstrate that ICT is a power tool that can induce the structural changes within and between countries, and will enable procurement-sensitive goods and services to move freely, fostering the competitiveness of European suppliers in domestic and world markets. An effective public procurement policy is fundamental to the success of the single market in achieving its objectives: to generate sustainable, long-term growth and create jobs, to foster the development of businesses capable of exploiting the opportunities generated by the single market and competitive in global markets, and to provide tax-payers and users of public services with best value for money. This paper will analyze and evaluate the electronic procurement projects carried out by European Commission to better understand how the use of new information technology supports the delivery of an effective public procurement policy. In the context of market opening and integration, the study will identify a number of key learning lessons based upon the experience of the European Union. The analysis of the data will provide a number of important results in relation to further actions to be undertaken by CEE countries, an action plan for follow-up and use of this research along with proposed recommendations for addressing the major issues for electronic public procurement development and use in the CEE region.