Impacts of policy-driven public procurement: a methodological review

In this paper, we review recent research on the impact of public procurement with a focus on methods and data. The growing interest in mobilizing procurement for strategic purposes, such as innovation, economic growth, social value, and sustainable development, has brought to light significant knowledge gaps on the impact of public procurement on products, solutions, actors, and markets. Using a comprehensive approach to analyse scholarly understandings of procurement, we find several notions of policy-driven public procurement and identify challenges in distinguishing between strategic and ‘regular’ public procurement. We then provide a critical discussion on data, examining the currently available data sources and highlighting the need for greater data integration and linkage at the firm level to enable the causal identification of innovation and other impacts from participation in procurement. To address these gaps, we propose a set of actions for research and practice.