Later this week at ERA's Annual Conference on Public Procurement 2016, I am presenting some of my thoughts about the competition and other practical implications of two main recent developments in public procurement policy and practice.
On the one hand, I will reflect on centralisation and collaboration in procurement and the increasingly commercial activity of central purchasing bodies. My remarks will be focused on two main issues: the legal difficulties that a policy on (cross-border) collaborative procurement faces, as well as the competition law implications of CPBs going commercial full tilt.
On the other hand, I will explore my concerns about the trend of creation of public (online) central registries of public contracts and the excessive transparency they can create in procurement intensive markets, which may result in severe anticompetitive implications (see here and here).
These are the slides I will use, with references to further reading.