The Evolution of the Policy of Legal Regulation on Public Procurement in Lithuania
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Abstract
This article aims to present in overview of the evolution of the policy of legal regulations on public procurement in Lithuania in 1990–2004. The public procurement policy in this article is understood as the concept, principles and main aims of legal regulation on this sphere.
According to some scientific researchers there are two major paradigm shifts of public procurement policy in the world – a shift from internal processes to value adding benefits and a shift to opening up of public purchasing market. The author analyses how those tendencies are reflected in Lithuanian public procurement policy and legislation. These concerns are explored applying logical, comparative and legal-historical methods.
The main intent of regulation on public procurement is to ensure that purchasing made by public or semi-public sector contracting authorities were effective. But what is effective, could be understood variously. In the precocious phase of Lithuanian public procurement regulation it was believed that the lowest price represented the effectiveness for government and the only award criteria was the price. But starting with 1995 it was created legal base for the evaluation not only the price of an object, but its value (in other words, it was allowed to award the contract on the criteria of the most economically advantageous offer).
Also the precocious phase of Lithuanian public procurement was based on “buy national” policy and was “rich” with overt and less visible forms of discrimination of foreign tenders. Only starting with 2000 (mainly influenced by integration processes to the European Union) public procurement market was opened up to international trade and public procurement legislation vouchsafed equal rights to foreign companies to be awarded a contract.
So investigation of Lithuanian legislation on public procurement points up a big progress of government policy in this sphere, but despite those positive changes, the operation of public procurement system is mainly based on the previous acquisition philosophy: contracts are generally awarded primarily on price and the focus of each acquisition is mainly the process itself. Also even then there is no official policy of buying national goods, but there are strong psychological, administrative and practical pressures.
According to some scientific researchers there are two major paradigm shifts of public procurement policy in the world – a shift from internal processes to value adding benefits and a shift to opening up of public purchasing market. The author analyses how those tendencies are reflected in Lithuanian public procurement policy and legislation. These concerns are explored applying logical, comparative and legal-historical methods.
The main intent of regulation on public procurement is to ensure that purchasing made by public or semi-public sector contracting authorities were effective. But what is effective, could be understood variously. In the precocious phase of Lithuanian public procurement regulation it was believed that the lowest price represented the effectiveness for government and the only award criteria was the price. But starting with 1995 it was created legal base for the evaluation not only the price of an object, but its value (in other words, it was allowed to award the contract on the criteria of the most economically advantageous offer).
Also the precocious phase of Lithuanian public procurement was based on “buy national” policy and was “rich” with overt and less visible forms of discrimination of foreign tenders. Only starting with 2000 (mainly influenced by integration processes to the European Union) public procurement market was opened up to international trade and public procurement legislation vouchsafed equal rights to foreign companies to be awarded a contract.
So investigation of Lithuanian legislation on public procurement points up a big progress of government policy in this sphere, but despite those positive changes, the operation of public procurement system is mainly based on the previous acquisition philosophy: contracts are generally awarded primarily on price and the focus of each acquisition is mainly the process itself. Also even then there is no official policy of buying national goods, but there are strong psychological, administrative and practical pressures.
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Authors retain copyright of their work, with first publication rights granted to the Association for Learning Technology.
Please see Copyright and Licence Agreement for further details.
