Original scientific paper
https://doi.org/10.3935/zpfz.76.5.2
The Single Market and Home Bias: Have the EU Directives Opened Up Public Procurement?
Pedro Telles
; Copenhagen Business School, Frederiksberg, Denmark
Abstract
This paper examines the success of EU public procurement Directives in opening up public procurement and integrating it into the single market. Through a secondary analysis of 11 studies conducted between 2007-2023, covering three generations of EU public procurement legislation, the research shows that successive rounds of increasingly detailed secondary legislation failed to substantially increase direct cross-border procurement or meaningfully reduce home bias. In addition to low direct cross-border procurement, import penetration data provide further evidence of persistent home bias, with public sector import penetration remaining significantly below that of the private sector. While the reasons for this lack of evolution are yet to be fully explained, the paper concludes that the path-dependent evolution of the procurement Directives, characterised by growing complexity without paradigmatic change, might have reached its limits for opening up public procurement and integrating it into the single market. With this failure in mind and as the current EU public procurement legislative framework is under review, alternative regulatory approaches, such as shifting to a Regulation as choice of legislative instrument or reverting to general EU procurement principles, may warrant consideration.
Keywords
EU public procurement; cross-border procurement; home bias; single market; internal market
Hrčak ID:
351903
URI
Publication date:
7.10.2026.
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