Joksimović Jelena, Perc Matjaž, Levnajić Zoran
Faculty of Information Sciences in Novo Mesto, Ljubljanska cesta 31A, Novo Mesto 8000, Slovenia.
Faculty of Natural Sciences and Mathematics, University of Maribor, Koroška cesta 160, Maribor 2000, Slovenia.
R Soc Open Sci. 2023 Aug 2;10(8):221279. doi: 10.1098/rsos.221279. eCollection 2023 Aug.
Private businesses are often entrusted with public contracts, wherein public money is allocated to a private company. This process raises concerns about transparency, even in the most developed democracies. But are there any regularities guiding this process? Do all private companies benefit equally from the state budgets? Here, we tackle these questions focusing on the case of Slovenia, which keeps excellent records of this kind of public spending. We examine a dataset detailing every transfer of public money to the private sector from January 2003 to May 2020. During this time, Slovenia has conducted business with no less than 248 989 private companies. We find that the cumulative distribution of money received per company can be reasonably well explained by a power-law or lognormal fit. We also show evidence for the first-mover advantage, and determine that companies receive new funding in a way that is roughly linear over time. These results indicate that, despite all human factors involved, Slovenian public spending is at least to some extent regulated by emergent self-organizing principles.
私营企业经常被委托承担公共合同，在这种情况下，公共资金被分配给一家私人公司。这一过程引发了对透明度的担忧，即使在最发达的民主国家也是如此。但是，这个过程是否有任何规律可循呢？所有的私人公司从国家预算中获得的利益是否均等呢？在这里，我们以斯洛文尼亚为例来解决这些问题，该国保留了这类公共支出的出色记录。我们研究了一个数据集，该数据集详细记录了2003年1月至2020年5月期间公共资金向私营部门的每一笔转移。在此期间，斯洛文尼亚与不少于248989家私营公司开展了业务。我们发现，每家公司收到的资金的累积分布可以通过幂律或对数正态拟合得到合理的解释。我们还展示了先行者优势的证据，并确定公司获得新资金的方式随时间大致呈线性。这些结果表明，尽管涉及所有人为因素，但斯洛文尼亚的公共支出至少在一定程度上受新兴的自组织原则的调节。
