WRITTEN QUESTION E-0563/00

by Christopher Huhne (ELDR) to the Commission

(29 February 2000)

Subject: Public procurement

What was the total amount of contracts won by the businesses of each Member State from EU Member State public authorities outside their country of origin in each of the last five years? Please give a breakdown of the total amount for each country by each other Member State.

Answer given by Mr Bolkestein on behalf of the Commission

(12 April 2000)

The Commission does not have at its disposal the statistics on the amount of contracts won by businesses of each Member State from public authorities outside their Member State of origin at the level of detail to provide the breakdown requested.

The Commission has been working towards a better understanding of the Community public procurement markets and has been developing a set of indicators to measure market trends and the impact of public procurement policy over time in fulfilment of its commitment in the communication on public procurement(1).

The Commission is currently preparing a preliminary set of nine indicators which provide annual estimates of total public procurement, the amount covered by the public procurement directives and the amount actually advertised in the Official journal as well as the number of entities publishing notices, the number of notices published and the amount of cross procurement within the Community. Additional indicators will measure the quality of published notices and compare prices paid by the public sector for the same or similar goods and services across the Community.

The volume of intra Community cross border procurement, the amount of procurement by public authorities of goods and services originating in another Member State, has proved difficult to measure for several reasons.

Firstly the free movement of goods within the Community makes it difficult to ascertain where particular goods procured by those authorities actually originated. The same is true for the freedom to provide services. Increasingly the right of establishment makes it an even more complicated matter to interpret those statistics on procurement provided by Member States. Another complicating issue is the formation of consortia of companies from several Member States, particularly for larger tenders and construction projects. Deciding where such consortia are based is often not meaningful and even to determine it proportionally would be difficult.

The public authorities themselves often do not know, or record, where specific goods or services originated.

For all these reasons the indicator of cross border procurement which is being developed has been based on a survey of the suppliers to public authorities, rather than the authorities themselves. This figures show the extent of cross border procurement within the Community. For each Member State the value of direct and indirect intra-Community imports are given as a percentage of total procurement in 1998.

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The indicator does not provide figures with a sufficient degree of reliability to measure bilateral cross border procurement between specific Member States. The estimate at the Community level is more reliable but figures for individual Member States should also be treated with some caution, due to the sample size (2000 companies surveyed). The figures represent all procurement, above and below the directives' thresholds, within the selected sectors.

A larger scale survey is planned in order to improve the accuracy of this indicator and to monitor progress. The Commission is pursuing the possibility of incorporating this survey within the framework of the structural business statistics programme carried out by Eurostat together with the Member States' statistical institutes.

(1) COM(98) 143 final.