Local centralization of public procurement and the impact of the pandemic shock

Recent years have been characterized by policies aimed at reducing the management costs of public spending through the increasingly centralized management of public procurement (PP). Empirical studies have focused on the effects of such centralizations at regional, national and European level. However, there are still no studies on the management of public procurement at the inter-municipal level. The purpose of this paper is to fill the gap in the literature by analyzing the differences in the performance measures of contracts managed at the municipal and supra-municipal level. We use a sample of 50,905 Italian public works contracts awarded, both by municipalities and by municipal unions, from 2012 to 2021. We estimate a fixed effect regression model which infers whether contracts awarded by a municipal union are characterized by a better performance in terms of winning rebate, delivery delays and execution cost overruns. Our preliminary results show that a public tender awarded by a municipal union is characterized by lower rebates, shorter delays and, for less complex works (those with an estimated value below euros 150,000), lower final execution extra costs. This suggests that municipal unions tend to be more efficient than municipalities at the execution, rather than the winning stage of the tender and this is particularly true for the completion time of the work covered by the contract.