Title: Analysing the European Union's Tenders Electronic Daily: possibilities and pitfalls

Authors: Eric Prier; Palina Prysmakova; Clifford P. McCue

Addresses: Department of Political Science, Florida Atlantic University, 3200 College Avenue, Davie, FL 33314-7714, USA ' School of Public Administration, Florida Atlantic University, 777 Glades Road, Boca Raton, FL 33431, USA ' School of Public Administration, Florida Atlantic University, 777 Glades Road, Boca Raton, FL 33431, USA

Abstract: As a public policy tool, the open data movement holds out hope of large payoffs in democratic transparency and accountability. This paper explores the efficacy of the Tenders Electronic Daily or TED open dataset which covers 33 European countries operating at numerous levels of government. While the recent move toward making the TED open data available in a potentially more user-friendly CSV format could have been a milestone in realising a major aspect of the goals of the open data movement, this study demonstrates that the redundant structure of the individual files is extremely difficult to understand in its current form. Moreover, the transparency that may have resulted from this initiative is unlikely to efficiently serve the purposes of public procurement accountability. As a result, the TED open data in CSV format should be approached with an abundance of caution.

Keywords: public purchase; e-government; transparency; large-scale dataset; contract award; contract notice; Tenders Electronic Daily; TED; accountability; procurement; European Union; open data; data quality.

DOI: 10.1504/IJPM.2018.095655

International Journal of Procurement Management, 2018 Vol.11 No.6, pp.722 - 747

Received: 27 Mar 2017
Accepted: 09 Oct 2017
Published online: 16 Oct 2018 *

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