IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/oec/govaac/76-en.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Overview of public procurement systems in the Western Balkans

Author

Listed:
  • Marian Lemke
  • Teja Kolar
  • Dariusz Piasta

Abstract

This paper provides a comprehensive assessment of procurement systems in the Western Balkans to identify trends and problems common to all administrations in the region. Drawing on the 2024 SIGMA Monitoring Reports, it reviews progress in aligning national frameworks with EU directives, highlights advances in digitalisation and transparency, and analyses persistent shortcomings. The report documents improvements in legal harmonisation, central procurement institutions, and review mechanisms, but stresses ongoing problems: low competition with frequent single-bid tenders, excessive reliance on lowest-price award criterion, weak contract management, and limited use of strategic procurement. It also underlines fragmented approaches to concessions and public-private partnerships, frequent exemptions for major infrastructure projects, and widespread distrust among businesses. Recommendations stress full legal harmonisation, expanded e-procurement, stronger appeals mechanisms, greater use of quality contract award criteria, and improved capacity-building across administrations.

Suggested Citation

  • Marian Lemke & Teja Kolar & Dariusz Piasta, 2025. "Overview of public procurement systems in the Western Balkans," SIGMA Papers 76, OECD Publishing.
    • Handle: RePEc:oec:govaac:76-en
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a
    for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oec:govaac:76-en. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/teoecfr.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.