UK Leading Procurement Transparency Alongside Columbia and Ukraine.

By Fiona Hunt.

The recent report on global government spending by Open Contracting Partnership and Spend Network, brought to light for the first time, the extraordinary size of the global procurement market and, alarmingly, the lack of open contracting.

Of the $13 trillion spent per annum by governments globally, only $362billion (2.8%), is published openly. Imagine the increased competition, reduced corruption, increased service delivery and overarching economic advantage to be gained with increasing openness by even a few percentage points.

Within that £13 trillion, these ten countries account for 75% of the total procurement figure.

China ??    US ??    Germany ??     India ??

France ??   UK ??    Indonesia ??   Canada ??   Italy ??

Within these top ten, it is only the UK who is considered ‘open’ with its procurement, based on the parameter of having more than 25% of their procurement published. There are only two other countries considered open against these same parameters; they are Ukraine and Columbia, and neither of these has spend levels comparable to any of the top ten countries.

Larger western economies like the US and Australia are considered only partially open with between 5% and 25% of their procurement spend published openly. Canada is considered to have only limited openness with less than 5% open publishing.

With strong economies and democratic systems in place, there are plenty of reasons why these countries should be indexing at above 25% in their published contracts too.

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