New project on cross-border public procurement

Within the 2011-2013 framework contract with European Commission’s DG TRADE “to provide economic analysis in support of trade negotiations and trade policy issues” CASE in cooperation with Ecorys is awarded a seven month project aimed at assessing the economic, social and environmental impact of possible changes in the EU policy on cross border access to its public procurement markets.

The project has three main objectives:

1. To provide economic analysis to assess the implications (cost and benefits) of changes to the access rules to the EU public procurement markets that are currently being scrutinized;
2. To highlight, the social and environmental effects of different policy options;
3. To provide an analytical framework to be used by the Commission to assess the economic impact of specific and targeted restrictions to access the EU public markets.  

With this work CASE experts Wojciech Paczynski, Christopher Napoli and Mahmut Tekce contribute to the hot global policy debate. Public procurement markets account for over 10% of GDP in large industrialised countries (above 2 trillion EUR annually in the EU alone), and a growing share in the emerging economies. These markets remain relatively closed with little cross border public procurement. Compared to its major trading partners the EU public procurement markets have been relatively open. Therefore, the EU continues to press for more opening of procurement abroad, using both bilateral negotiations and in the context of the WTO Agreement on Government Procurement.

These issues are among key elements of trade agenda related to the Europe 2020 Strategy.
More information can be found here [http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=COM:2010:0612:FIN:EN:HTML] and here [http://trade.ec.europa.eu/consultations/?consul_id=154].