New paper out

I have just published a new article entitled "Looking into the Public Procurement Data Space and eForms" on the Public Procurement Law Review. As per the title it is focused on the PPDS and eForms as well. Here's the intro:

"In 2017, the European Commission published the Communication Making Public Procurement work in and for Europe.1 In this Communication, the Commission stated that clear and consolidated procurement data often was unavailable and, consequently, data-driven policymaking was not possible.2 This was a recognition of the fact, from a technical perspective, that the technical solutions for electronic procurement enshrined in Directive 2014/24 were unable to achieve such goals—a view compounded in 2020 with the Communication A European Strategy for Data from the Commission.3 As such, part of the ambition of the European Commission for the next few years was to increase transparency, integrity and better data in public procurement. To do so, the Commission took two major steps. The first was a recent but expansive ambition for public procurement data via the Communication on a European Public Procurement Data Space4 (PPDS), and the second a more technical solution called eForms. eForms are the new standard for public procurement notices, which will allow for procurement data to be captured in a structured format for the first time, which is fundamental to the success of the PPDS.

The article is structured with an initial overview of the current state of data in public procurement, followed by an overview of the Public Procurement Data Space (PPDS) as well as its characteristics, ambitions, and issues. The article is concluded with an analysis of eForms, its benefits, limitations and competing interests.

The article shows that both the PPDS and eForms, as currently designed, improve to an extent data completeness and quality. Nonetheless, such improvements will be limited and not enough to enable a data-driven policy for public procurement. This is essentially due to a misalignment of incentives between what the Commission wishes to achieve and what work the Member States and contracting authorities will have to undertake."

Citation: Pedro Telles, Looking into the Public Procurement Data Space and eForms,  Public Procurement Law Review, 1, 2024, pp. 14-27.