The Green Transition and Competition in Public Procurement

Over the last decade, the European legislation on public procurement has been clarified to facilitate "green" public procurement. Traditionally best value for money has been the main goal of public procurement, while new regulations have increased the scope for secondary goals such as environmental policy etc. We investigate how the secondary goal of greener public procurement has affected output of public tenders. Using the TED database, we investigate whether environmental criteria in public contracts are associated with a lower degree of competition. Exploring French public contracts between 2017 and 2020 for the 122 largest cities and metropolitan areas, our results show that the introduction of a green criterium in the public procurement notices negatively impacts the number of firms participating in the competitive tenders.