NOVA Information Management School (NOVA IMS), Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Lisboa, Portugal.
Instituto Superior de Economia e Gestão (ISEG) - Universidade de Lisboa, Lisboa, Portugal.
PLoS One. 2021 Dec 8;16(12):e0260806. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0260806. eCollection 2021.
Public procurement refers to the purchase by public sector entities-such as government departments or local authorities-of Services, Goods, or Works. It accounts for a significant share of OECD countries' expenditures. However, while governments are expected to execute them as efficiently as possible, there is a lack of methodologies for an adequate comparison of procurement activity between institutions at different scales, which represents a challenge for policymakers and academics. Here, we propose using methods borrowed from urban scaling laws literature to study public procurement activity among 278 Portuguese municipalities between 2011 and 2018. We find that public procurement expenditure scales sublinearly with population size, indicating an economy of scale for public spending as cities increase their population size. Moreover, when looking at the municipal Scale-Adjusted Indicators (the deviations from the scaling law) by contract categories-Works, Goods, and Services-we are able to identify a richer local characterisation of municipalities based on the similarity of procurement activity. These results make up a framework for quantitatively studying local public expenditure by enabling policymakers a more appropriate foundation for comparative analysis.
公共采购是指公共部门实体（如政府部门或地方当局）采购服务、商品或工程。它占经合组织国家支出的很大一部分。然而，尽管政府期望尽可能有效地执行这些采购，但缺乏对不同规模机构之间采购活动进行充分比较的方法，这对政策制定者和学者来说是一个挑战。在这里，我们建议使用从城市规模法则文献中借鉴的方法来研究 2011 年至 2018 年间 278 个葡萄牙城市的公共采购活动。我们发现，公共采购支出规模随人口规模呈次线性增长，这表明随着城市人口规模的增加，公共支出存在规模经济。此外，当我们按合同类别（工程、商品和服务）查看市政调整指标（偏离规模法则的程度）时，我们能够根据采购活动的相似性，对城市进行更丰富的本地化描述。这些结果为定量研究地方公共支出提供了一个框架，使政策制定者能够为比较分析提供更合适的基础。
