The first ever meeting of the Heads of Procurement of the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS) took place on June 20-21 in Barbados with the dark storm clouds of Tropical Storm Bret as the backdrop. Fittingly, the discussion focused on how to create a common market for public procurement and to use procurement as a tool to better prepare for and respond to the natural disasters endemic to the region.
There is no sign that the revival of interest in adaptive and entrepreneurial approaches to development work is going tail off soon.
That’s why the demand is growing for indications of how the broad principles, as summarised in the Doing Development Differently Manifesto, apply to the various sectors where interested practitioners are found.
Fred Golooba-Mutebi and I have just published an ODI working paper that begins to fill that gap for one particular economic infrastructure sector, road construction and maintenance. The country is Uganda. The purpose of the study was to revisit a 2009 paper on the political economy of reform in the sector, which was followed by the launching of a DFID-funded programme called CrossRoads.
Efficiency. Competitiveness. Innovation. Integrity.
Do these words come to mind when you think of State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs)?
From June 2-3, 2015 in Santiago, Chile, over 100 representatives of governments, SOEs, and academia from 13 countries came together to discuss how to advance these ideals, at the fourth Annual Meeting of the Latin American Network on Corporate Governance of State-Owned Enterprises, co-organized by the World Bank, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), and the Latin American Development Bank (CAF).
SOEs are commercial enterprises owned by governments, in full or in part. Across Latin America, SOEs still represent a significant portion of GDPs
, national expenditures, employment, and government revenues. Many SOEs provide essential public goods and services like water, electricity, and transportation.
In the last ten years, China’s public procurement market has grown tenfold reaching an estimated $270 billion in 2013. Such significant growth has made the improvement of the public procurement system an imperative for the Chinese Government.
In the context of China’s commitment to enhance its procurement system, it is also seeking to accede the World Trade Organization’s Government Procurement Agreement (WTO GPA). As China looks to necessary procurement reforms, the World Bank has partnered with the Ministry of Finance to support these efforts, which have the potential to have transformational impact.
