New opportunities for public procurement outsourcing
Abstract
The hypothesis in the article is that outsourcing of some functions of public purchasers in Bulgaria could lead to a reduction in their transaction costs in the process of awarding contracts, given the significant cost of financial corrections related to the violations in public procurement in projects funded by European and Structural Funds. Financial corrections are addressed in the context of the New Institutional Economy and are attributed to transaction costs. An attempt is made to determine their value in order to assess possible savings. The study does not unambiguously prove the hypothesis, as the results obtained do not show a significant share of the cost of financial corrections in the total transaction costs of public procurement. In this regard, other elements of the awarding process have been proposed to examine whether the outsourcing of some functions of this process would produce positive economic effects.
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