H76 - State and Local Government: Other Expenditure CategoriesNávrat zpět

The purpose of this article is to analyse the post-contractual behaviour in the procurement system, which we investigated in a sample of Slovak contracting authorities at the level of local government as well as central government. This is an analysis of changes in contracts that were concluded on the basis of the law on public procurement. While the pre-contractual phase is treated by law, in the post-contractual phase we can identify something like "a legal vacuum", which can be exploited to corrupt practices. Article examines how important (particularly in terms of impact on the price) are changes in the contracts concluded under the law on public contracts and whether it is possible to identify some factors which affect this behaviour. The regression analysis showed that the prices ex-post rise more if the open procedure was used as well as if there was strong competition on the supply side (In these cases, it is more difficult to ex-ante manipulate with the outcome of the public contract). Therefore, it is probably that a number of amendments closed an evasion of the law on public procurement, and leads to losses in the public finances.

The article deals with structural factors affecting decisions about the provision of services in large Slovak cities. In addition to introducing an economic model based on transaction cost theory, models of political decision making regarding the provision of services by cities (ideological model, public choice theory and political risk-aversion model) are described. The article concentrates upon decisions regarding the provision of seven selected services in eight major Slovak cities. In addition to collecting data on the means of providing the selected services, relevant decision makers about the perceived asset specificity and about the measurability of selected services have been interviewed. The findings partly confirm economic hypotheses about the provision of public services, which suggest that oursourcing is expected if the services to be provided are easily measurable. The findings are also consistent with models based on political decision-making, but do not allow to pinpoint any of the political models as the facts are consistent with all three of them.