Research On The Scale And Efficiency Of Government Procurement

The theoretical researches and practices of contemporary government procurement created in the western laisser faire capitalism countries at the end of 18th century and the beginning of 19th century has become maturing with each passing year. The multiple-orientation, multiple-level and comprehensive theoretical researches have been made on the background, connotation definition, practical operation, economical and social effect and target pattern of government procurement from the aspects of system, economics, management science, politics, sociology, law, psychology and ethology. However, few achievement in systematical study on the scale and efficiency of government procurement has been seen. In practice, as a critical part of public expenditure, the government procurement is reputed as "Sunshine Procurement" since it has significant and far-reaching meanings in carrying out the government intention, saving the financial fund and regulating the procurement activities. Due to the disadvantages of being late in taking the first step, small scale and low efficiency, the functions of government procurement have been more or less impacted. This paper is trying to probe into the problems in the scale and efficiency of government procurement from the aspects of scale and efficiency base on the theories and practice. It's believed in the paper that due to the joint function of multiple factors, the proper and reasonable expenditure of government procurement shall be analyzed from many aspects. Viewing from the demand and supply, the scale of government procurement determined by demand factor and supply factor shall be basically equivalent; viewing from the internal and external proper proportionality requirement of financial resource allocation, the proper government procurement scale shall be the one conforming to both the internal proper proportionality requirement (i.e. the government procurement expenditure is in proper proportion with the transfer expenditure) and external proper proportionality requirement (i.e. the government procurement expenditure takes proper percentage in GDP or GNP). The optimized scale of government procurement can be determined by weighting the absolute and relative indexes of government procurement scale. It's on those bases that the absolute scale of government procurement is discussed focused on the optimized allocation of financial resources from the standpoint of market and the relative scale of government procurement is discussed focused on the reasonable allocation of financial resources from the standpoint of government. Finally, the article gives an analysis about the reasonable expenditure government procurement in China,thinks that We should enlarge the scale of government procurement actively and steadily.It's no doubt that efficiency is the core of government procurement. Having described the efficiency and the efficient condition of government procurement, the paper makes the analysis and comparison on the efficiency and welfare loss of the centralized government procurement and decentralized government procurement in buyer's (seller's) market respectively from the standpoints of producer, consumer and elaborates the advantages of the centralized government procurement in terms of efficiency and fairness before gets the conclusion that centralized government procurement is a Pareto improvement compared to the decentralized procurement, which verifies the assertion that the centralized government procurement in general meaning is superior to the decentralized government procurement from the aspect of welfare economics. However, the disadvantages of centralized procurement and advantages of decentralized are not evaded in this paper. The writer declares that each country shall select the procurement mode applicable to its national conditions and believes that with the popularization of electronic trade the government procurement will be again tending to the centralized mode. Scientific technology is the first productive force and the technological advancement i...