Current Research and Work in Progress

Framework Agreements on IT Services. The paper presents a case study on the implementation of a Framework Agreement (multi-supplier and not all conditions laid down) for IT services on behalf of the Department of Treasury of the Italian Ministry of Economy and Finance.

Green Public Procurement and Centralization. The paper argues that a proper tendering design with green criteria may be harmed by the difficulty for the contracting authorities to correctly weight the “sustainable” awarding criteria, due to too a broad assessment of the value of sustainability aspects considered in the contract. Moreover, public buyers may not be provided with adequate financial and accounting tools to internalize the direct benefits from green public procurement, due to binding constraints on multi-year budgeting and to the internal organizational structure of many public administrations. It is argued that centralized public procurement strategies may help get round such problems.

“Machiavelian” Public Private Partnerships. Public Private Partnerships (PPPs) have been widely advocated as flexible contractual solutions enabling the public sector to profit from private firms’ innovative solutions for providing public services. More recently, however, practitioners and academics alike have cast doubts on a possible instrumental use of PPPs. When most of the upfront investment rests on the private partner, the public counterpart may be tempted by reaping the benefit in the short-term while shifting to farther years the financial burden. If the political cycle, especially at the Municipality or Regional levels, is short enough, such a “Machiavelian” use of PPPs may become an easy way to play up voters during electoral competitions. We test this “political economy” hypothesis by using data from local projects in Italy.