New working paper is out

I have just uploaded to SSRN a new working paper on the failure of the successive rounds of Directives in solving the direct cross-border issue. In short, home bias is as almost as present today as it was in the 1960s. For this one I dabbed a bit outside the more traditional legal black letter analysis to make my case. Here's the abstract:

This paper examines the effectiveness of EU public procurement Directives in opening up public procurement and integrating it into the single market. Through a secondary analysis of 11 studies conducted between 2007-2023, covering three generations of EU public procurement legislation, the evidence shows that undertakings winning contracts outside their home member State remains limited. In addition to low direct cross-border procurement, import penetration data provides further evidence of persistent home bias, with public sector import penetration significantly lower than private. The research reveals that successive rounds of increasingly detailed secondary legislation failed to substantially increase cross-border procurement or meaningfully reduce home bias. While the reasons for this lack of evolution are yet to be fully explained, the paper concludes that the path-dependent evolution of the procurement Directives, characterised by growing complexity without paradigmatic change, might have reached its limits for opening up public procurement and integrating it into the single market. With this failure in mind and as the current EU public procurement legislative framework is under review, alternative regulatory approaches, such as shifting to a Regulation as choice of legislative instrument or reverting to general EU procurement principles, may warrant consideration.