Search

With more than 5,000 annual contracts and an estimated total budget of 738.3 million euros invested in institutional advertising, the public sector is the main advertiser in Spain. In its tenders, one of the aspects with the greatest impact on the award is the economic offer. The application of current regulations to ten tenders is analyzed, with special attention to abnormal low bids. The results show that the tenders favor aggressive economic offers. The best technical bid does not always win, and the impact of abnormally low bids as such is reduced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The digitisation of local terrestrial television in Spain at the start of 2000 has brought, together with the full regulation of this form of television, a model with a strong presence of the private sector The article describes and analyses the licensing processes that were set underway between 2004 and 2006 in the autonomous communities of Andalusia, Aragón, Asturias, Baleares, Canarias, Cantabria, Catalonia, Comunidad Valenciana, Extremadura, Galicia, Madrid, Murcia, Navarre and the Basque Country, with special emphasis on the seven that have been resolved to date. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on current practices and the state of green public procurement enables the identification of areas that can be improved, as well as opportunities to improve the tendering procedures from an environmental point of view. To understand the behaviour of local, provincial, and regional administrations concerning green public procurement, a case study on the Valencia region of Spain is made. The Valencian region is one of the most important communities in terms of population, number of contracting authorities, and weight in the Spanish Gross Domestic Product. In this study, a total of 967 procedures were analysed from calls for tenders made by municipal, provincial, and regional administrations in2016 and 2017.The results of this study show that the use of environmental criteria is 19.7% and the average weight is 4.1 out of 100. The civil engineering subsector, more than the building subsector, employs environmental criteria, particularly in projects tendered by regional administrations, whereas for projects with large budgets the level of use is similar for both subsectors. It is necessary to encourage plans to improve Green Public Procurement (GPP) practices in the Valencian administrations, especially those with a local scope such as municipalities.

Spain has a reference price system (RPS) for off-patent medicines since 1997. In addition, from 2012, Andalusia is running a series of tenders for procuring off-patent medicines dispensed by community pharmacies, for those medicines included in the system of homogenous clusters within the national reference price system. Such tenders offer additional savings to the regional payer - in the form of rebates ("economic improvements") from companies winning the tender. This paper estimates that the regional savings were between €43 M to €54 M over the period of study (April - September 2015). The paper also estimates that Spain could have made between 14 and 17 times higher savings than the national reference pricing system savings, had the Andalusian-type tender been implemented at national level over the same period of study. Based on our analysis, we have four remarks. First, the national RPS in Spain is not generating enough price competition for off-patent products dispensed in primary care pharmacies. Second, tenders can be a useful way to generate competition and financial savings in the off-patent market. Third, tenders can lead to discounts offered by medicine providers being redistributed from pharmacies to payers. And fourth, before implementing a national tender in Spain, several key issues need to be addressed to ensure it provides the right incentives both in the short and long run., (Copyright © 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Universities play an important role among public institutions because they initiate huge purchasing and contracting activities and contribute to sustainable development through education, research, and day-to-day operations. Existing studies on green public procurement (GPP) practices at Spanish universities focus on products and services. For this study, a total of 316 procedures were collected and analysed from the calls for tenders made by Spanish public universities between 2016 and 2017. The environmental criteria involved in the tenders and their weights were classified by subsector, geographical scope, and project budget. The results of this study show the use of environmental criteria in the works tendered by Spanish public universities is low (19.2%) in comparison with the results of other studies. It is therefore necessary to encourage GPP practices in the contracting process to comply with the environmental policies that universities have defined as part of their institutional policies.