Public Procurement's Place in the World ― The Charge Towards Sustainability and Innovation

With up to 20% of GDP being used on public procurement, it accounts for a significant part of the global economy. This volume addresses different issues related to green innovation procurement as well as exploring the challenges involved in public procurement. The studies offer a broad array of perspectives, addressing both general, abstract problems of optimal public procurement and concrete cases of national or even local public procurement systems.

The evidence presented covers a variety of different countries including, Italy, Latvia, the Netherlands and several African countries. Reflecting the different areas of expertise of the authors, the studies draw from Economics, Engineering, Law and Organization approaches to public procurement and use both theoretical and empirical methods to produce a comprehensive analysis. Accordingly, they contain policy suggestions that are likely to be useful for the design of policies in these areas of public procurement, which are hotly debated topics both in the policy and academic circles.

Francesco Decarolis is Assistant Professor of Economics at Boston University, USA. He holds a BA in Economics from Universita' Bocconi, Milan, Italy and a MA and PhD in Economics from the University of Chicago, USA. Prior to joining Boston University, he worked at the Bank of Italy, the University of Wisconsin Madison, USA, and the University of Pennsylavnia, USA.

Marco Frey is Professor and Director of the Institute of Management, Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna, Pisa, Italy. He is the leader of a research group, and responsible for research projects on sustainability management. He is also Research Director at IEFE-Bocconi since 1986, Chairman of the UN Global Compact Italian Network, President of Active Citizenship and President of the Scientific Committee of Symbola.