Paper/Speech Details of Conference Program for the 15th NISPAcee Annual Conference Program Overview General Session Author(s) Jan Pavel University of Economics of Prague Praha 3 Czech Republic Jan Pavel Emilia Sicakova-Beblava Title Transparency of Public Procurement Market – Case of The Czech and Slovak Republic File Paper files are available only for conference participants, please login first. Presenter Abstract Public procurement is a very important instrument used for allocation of a major part of public expenditures. Because of its importance, guarantees of a transparent and professional system of public procurement should exist in every developed country. However, the reality in the CEE countries is different. A number of tenders are not open and therefore funding allocation is not transparent and possibly also not effective. Over the last years, the size of the public procurement market in the CEE transition economies has increased. As of today, we estimate that public procurement in CEE represents more than 10 % of GDP (in case of the Czech Republic even 17 % of GDP). The first part of our paper describes the development of the public procurement law in the Czech and Slovak Republics during the period of 2001-2005. We try to identify how the changes in the law could have affected the transparency of public tenders and if there exist legal ways of contract allocation without any public tender. In the second part we develop three indicators in order to measure the transparency of the public procurement market. The first indicator describes how many percent of the overall public procurement market is allocated through open tenders. The second indicator shows how many percent of the overall public procurement expenditures are allocated through so-called “small” contracts, i.e. contracts which are not directly specified by the law and which have a character of a “free hand” choice. The last indicator deals with international transparency and shows how many percent of the overall public procurement expenditures are advertised in the EC Journal. Within the third part we calculate the previously defined indicators for the Czech and Slovak Republics for the period 2001-2005. Preliminary results indicate that the situation in the sphere of transparency is not good. Through open contracts is allocated only one third of the overall volume of public procurement expenditures. Much more frequent are “small” contracts. We can also find significant differences between the Czech and Slovak Republics. This is a result of different national laws. The last part provides synthetic conclusions. We analyse the main reasons for the low degree of transparency in the procurement systems of the Czech and Slovak Republics and suggest several measures of how to improve them. Key Words: Czech and Slovak Republics; Effectiveness; Public Expenditures; Public Procurement; Transparency
