Cutback Management Through Public Procurement in Spanish Regional Governments

Resumen

From the seminal Levine's (1978, 1979, 1981) contributions to the most recent papers likeOngaro et al. (2015), Raudla et al. (2015) or Kickert & Randma-Liiv (2016), cutbackmanagement literature has not usually paid a specific attention to public procurement. AsTátrai (2015: 255) states: "Cutback management has recently become a feature in publicprocurement in many countries, but thus far very few academic papers have analysed this newreality." Our paper attempts to contribute to filling this gap, pursuing a research objective thatis twofold. Firstly, we try to quantify and analyse cutbacks made in Spanish regionalgovernments’ contractual expenditures, comparing the real growth rates in these expendituressince the Great Recession with their corresponding pre-crisis rates. Secondly, we try to do thesame with the different cutback measures taken by those governments regarding publicprocurement (postponing procurement, deferral of maintenance, contractual commitmentsagainst future budgets, open auctioning and loosing qualification standards, centralizingprocurement, substituting traditional procurement by public-private partnerships, delayingpayments to contractors, hiding contractual expenditures...). In these two steps of our analysis,we try to identify and/or highlight the main strategies used and patterns shown by thegovernments under study, considering both similarities and differences between them.