Transaction Costs in the Czech and Slovak E-procurement: Selected Issues
Transaction Costs in the Czech and Slovak E-procurement: Selected Issues

Author(s): Juraj Nemec, Matúš GREGA, Marta Orviská, Markéta Šumpíková
Subject(s): Business Economy / Management, ICT Information and Communications Technologies
Published by: Masarykova univerzita nakladatelství
Keywords: public procurement; electronisation; transaction costs; Czech Republic; Slovakia;
Summary/Abstract: Experts and public procurement offices state that e-procurement increases the competition in public procurement and thank to this saves an important sum of public money. However, the real picture is not so simple. First, their calculations use the difference between estimated and final price to calculate savings, which is very problematic indicator. Second, there is the issue of transaction costs – and some studies suggest that transaction costs can be higher than above indicated formal savings. The goal of this paper was to calculate selected types of transaction costs of e-solutions in the public procurement in the Czech Republic and in the Slovak Republic. The first part of the analysis presented the estimates of the transaction costs of the Slovak e-market system, which is functional from 2012 and its current software available from 2014. The second part of the analysis presented similar calculations for the Czech national eprocurement tool – NEN. The calculated data have important methodological limitations and should not be used to say in definite way that e-procurement is very effective, or – opposite – too costly. However these data seem to suggest that electronisation of procurement has important potential, especially in situations when new electronic solutions are implemented for reasonable costs (no corruption) and serve to large number of purchasing operation (economies of scale).

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