The challenge
Public contracts worth about 15% of GDP were often awarded without real competition.
The case
Ukraine piloted ProZorro, an online procurement platform, in February 2015; from August 2016 all public purchases had to go through it. Every tender and contract is published as open data, and electronic auctions became the default way to pick suppliers. The share of procurement value awarded competitively rose from 24.5% in 2015 to 70.3% in 2017, and the share of buyers signing single-supplier contracts fell from 11% to 5%. But a 2019 Center for Global Development study of contracts tendered competitively before and after the reform found only modest effects: final prices 3.5% to 5.8% below estimates and contracts signed 5 to 6 days faster, with no robust rise in bidder numbers.
Why the results were mixed
Putting every contract online brought far more buying into the open and made abuse easier to spot, but transparency alone did little to raise competition within tenders. Results depend on bidders turning up, which needs work beyond the platform.
Sources
- Kovalchuk, A., Kenny, C. & Snyder, M. (2019). Examining the Impact of E-Procurement in Ukraine: Center for Global Development Working Paper 511.
- Open Contracting Partnership (2018). Learning insights: The latest impacts emerging from Ukraine’s Prozorro reforms.
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