DOI: 10.5061/dryad.5x69p8d6x
title: Data from Commission for the Prevention of Corruption of the Republic of Slovenia: public-to-private transactions

description: Public spending is often a contentious subject because different political
 parties have different agendas as to what should be the current
 national priorities. Of course, the same is true for the public in
 general. It is thus of interest to determine whether public
 spending is indeed as biased and capricious as it is
 often perceived, or whether there nevertheless exist some
 fundamental principles that guide it. We use data from the
 Commission for the Prevention of Corruption of the Republic of Slovenia,
 detailing every transfer of public money to the private sector
 from January 2003 to May 2020. During this time Slovenia has
 done business with no less than 248,989 companies. We find that
 the cumulative distribution of money received per company can be
 reasonably well explained by means of a power-law or a log-normal fit. We
 also show evidence for the first-mover advantage, and determine
 that the attachment rate of public spending to companies over
 time is roughly linear. These results indicate that Slovenian public
 spending is to a large extent guided by self organizing
 principles that, against all odds, go beyond nefarious interests
 and lobbying.
description: Being a (relatively) small nation, Slovenia keeps excellent
 records of its public spending via the Commission for the Prevention of
 Corruption of the Republic of Slovenia (CPC).  It is an independent agency
 with a broad mandate to prevent and investigate corruption and other
 breaches of ethics and integrity, with a special focus on transparency of
 public spending.  CPC gathers the data from nine different public
 institutions in Slovenia, including the Ministry of Finance, Public
 procurement portal and Public Payments Administration. In particular, all
 private companies registered in Slovenia are under legal obligation to
 report the exact information on any business done using public funds.
 Hence, CPC keeps track of all transactions where public money is being
 spent on business with private sector. For transparency motives all this
 data is publicly available on the CPC website. Upon signing the adequate
 contract, we received this data set from the CPC. The received data set
 includes all public-to-private transactions from January 2003 to May 2020.
 During these 209 months, it turns out, Republic of Slovenia has done
 business (ordering services or buying goods) with exactly 248,989
 companies. To avoid noise and uncertainties we excluded from further
 analysis companies that in this period made less than 10,000 EUR. This
 cut-off in total spending per company translates to 105,086 companies to
 which we focus in the analysis. In this matrix, each element is the amount
 of money (in EUR) that some company received from all public bodies during
 one of these 209 months. In other words, for any given company we have a
 time series with 209 values, each value representing the volume of
 business done using public funds overthat month. This data is possibly
 unique in the world. Its completeness and precision allows for examining
 the presence of self-organization, which is what we devote the rest of
 this paper to. Specifically, we find a heavy-tailed distributions of total
 public spending per company versus company rank that can be fitted
 reasonably well by a power-law.
description: Please see the README.md document and the accompanying published
 article: J. Joksimović,M. Perc and and Z. Levnajić (2023).
 Self-organization in Slovenian public spending. Accepted.