Abstract
The health emergency which started in 2020 has set off a new request for the understanding of public decision-making and underlying information.
During the emergency phase, governments encouraged the use of simplified purchasing procedures to ensure the acceleration of public action and to attempt to stem the pandemic. As considerable amounts of public money have been rightly used during the emergency in the interest of public health, our goal is to investigate the level of transparency ensured by the procedures utilized for purchasing goods and services.
To this end, we have considered data regarding all the expenses related to the health emergency through public administration calls for tenders between January 01, 2020, and April 30, 2021. The data analyzed suggests speed, simplification, and transparency are not always strictly correlated, and this could be a critical issue in order to guarantee virtuous public policies.
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Notes
- 1.
Analysis by the EU-financed ANTICORRP program shows a strong correlation between corruption and government overspending, under-collection of taxes, and fiscal deficits. See https://anticorrp.eu/project/overview/.
- 2.
All Member States are signatories to the 2017 Tallin and 2009 Malmö Ministerial Declaration on eGovernment, and many are part of the Open Government Partnership. Transparency is integral to the vision and principles of the eGovernment Action Plan 2016–2020, measured by the eGovernment Benchmark and the Digital Economy and Society Index (DESI), and subject to several projects under Horizon 2020 (EU, 2017).
- 3.
See Open polis survey at https://www.openpolis.it/il-ruolo-del-foia-per-la-tutela-della-salute/
- 4.
As pronounced in the decision n. 20/2019 of the Italian Constitutional Court
- 5.
Data is mainly from ANAC (national anti-corruption authority) source through the National Public Contracts Database which only provides lots with a starting price of more than 40,000 euros. Openpolis has selected some keywords for the search in the subject of the lots. Another source is the data on the contracts made available by the Civil Protection. Furthermore, various data were obtained from the sites of some contracting stations. See https://bandicovid.openpolis.it
- 6.
A call for tenders is divided into one or more lots which may relate to different supplies, services, and works. Consequently, lots of the same tender can have different amounts and be awarded to different companies.
- 7.
In Italian CIG (codice identificativo di gara): it is a code adopted in Italy to identify a public contract stipulated following a tender or entrusted with one of the other methods permitted by the public contracts code.
- 8.
Other detailed information on the contract and on the winners have not been used in our analysis.
- 9.
On March 17, 2020, in our healthcare system, a Special Commissioner was introduced for the implementation and coordination of the measures necessary for the containment and contrast of the epidemiological emergency COVID-19.
- 10.
It is a type of negotiated procedure with which the contracting authority awards a public contract without completing the ordinary preliminary phase of publication of the tender notice. See public contract code, art. 59.
- 11.
Contractor selection procedures are how contracting authorities decide how to award a contract. They are governed by the procurement code which establishes the situations and ways in which they can be used.
- 12.
The emergency legislation has greatly simplified the use of extraordinary procedures.
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Bagnasco, A.M., Alti, T. (2022). Simple and Transparent: A Positive Correlation for Virtuous Public Administrations. In: Tsounis, N., Vlachvei, A. (eds) Advances in Quantitative Economic Research. ICOAE 2021. Springer Proceedings in Business and Economics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98179-2_22
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