AD ALTA
JOURNAL OF INTERDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH
the reality about the awareness and perception of the modernized
electronic public procurement in the EU and, in particular, in the
Czech Republic?
2 Materials and Methods
The aim of this paper is to assess the roots and context of the
awareness and perception of the modernized electronic public
procurement in the EU, and in particular in the Czech Republic.
This aim rests on primary and secondary research linked to the
three hypotheses addressing the awareness and perception as
reported in other EU member states and in the entire EU and as
revealed by the pioneering Czech case study. Particular attention
is paid to the attitude of competitors regarding the Initiative, i.e.
whether they believe that the Initiative, along with other
instruments and the entire framework, contributes to the increase
of the effectiveness, efficiency and sustainability of public
procurement. Boldly, the ultimate question is whether, according
to their opinion, the modernized electronic public procurement
has a positive impact on the digital single internal market and the
competition in it.
The mentioned three hypotheses are:
H1 - Respondents are aware about the Initiative of the EU and
its goal to increase the effectiveness, efficiency and
sustainability of the public procurement?
H2 - The Initiative of the EU will not have an impact on
competition between businesses?
H3 - Introduction of electronic communication in public
procurement is perceived positively.
The employed research methods reflect options implied by the
availability of domestic and foreign policy documents, literature,
electronic and media resources and the case study. For the
theoretic foundations and theoretic part of this paper, the method
of description and critical interpretation is applied. For the
practical part of the paper, the gathering of information is done
by the collection, classification, verification and analysis. The
explored resources, to yield this information and process it
methodologically, entail the EU and national legislation,
political and press releases and academic literature. The
heterogeneous and multi-disciplinary nature of the data calls for
the Meta-Analysis (Silverman, 2013), while using a holistic
approach, a critical comparison of EU and EU member states
policies, law and frameworks and confronting the concepts with
the reality of the Czech case study. The quantitative research and
data is complemented by qualitative research, along with a
critical closing and commenting and refreshed by Socratic
questioning (Areeda, 1996).
A pivotal aspect of the practical part is the case study, entailing
the questionnaire investigation done in the Czech Republic and
using the questionnaire, with six half-closed questions and four
open questions. The questionnaire was created in the manner to
confirm or reject the set hypotheses. In total, 60 respondents
were contacted and 42 completed the questionnaire. Therefore,
the conditions for using the chi-square were satisfied.
Consequently, there was employed the method of questionnaire
and forensic investigation, the method of categorical data
processing by the software program Statistika and the method of
dependence of quantitative signs of Pearson chi-squares
(Pearson, 2009). It needs to be emphasized that, for the Pearson
chi-square, two dependencies are analyzed via statistical analysis
of table’s frequencies. In order to confirm or reject each of the
three hypothesis (H1, H2 and H3), there was used a support
contingency table 2x2, which monitors the dependence between
two qualitative signs. This contingency table facilitates the
performance of the dependency test with respect to two
qualitative values. The set null hypothesis is tested as hypothesis
of independency H0. While creating the contingency tables 2x2,
there is observed the relation between only two qualitative
variables and where each variable has only two categories. The
questionnaire search was done in the Czech Republic and with
pre-selected competitors who participate in public procurement
as interested providers.
3 Modernized electronic public procurement – EU roots and
context
The EU framework for the modernized electronic public
procurement is implied by primary, secondary and
supplementary sources of the EU law and by various policy and
strategy instruments. Pursuant to the primary source of the EU
law with constitutional features – the Treaty on the functioning
of the EU (“TFEU”), the Regulations have a general application,
are binding in their entirety and directly applicable in all EU
member states (Art.288 TFEU) and so they vigorously penetrate
into the national settings (Azolai, 2011), while a very similar
effect have the Directives, after the expiration of their deadline
for national transposition. Consequently, the eIDAS Regulation
is binding in its entirety and is directly applicable in all EU
member states since 2016, except for certain provisions which
had their application moved to 2014 or 2018 (Art.52 Regulation
2014) and is critical for the materialization of supplementary
sources, such as EU strategies, including Europe 2020 (Erixon,
2010; Pasimeni & Pasimeni, 2016, Stec & Grzebyk, 2017,
MacGregor Pelikánová & Beneš, 2017, MacGregor Pelikánová
et al., 2017), Investment Plan for Europe and the Initiative. It is
also necessary to mention SMART elements and their
implementation not only in European documents, but also in
common practice (Turečková & Nevima, 2018).
It needs to be underscored that the prior EU setting was
confronted with a set of crises leading to an insufficient
investment across the EU and to the failure of the Lisbon
strategy desperately trying to make the EU the world economic
leader (MacGregor Pelikánová, 2017). Well, the Lisbon strategy
was replaced by a new ten year strategy, Europe 2020
(MacGreogor Pelikánová et al., 2017) and, a few years later, the
Investment Plan for Europe and Initiative have emerged. They
all focus on the single internal market and competition in it
(Chirita, 2014), especially in the digital setting (Balcerzak, 2016,
Vivant, 2016). Since all, or as many as possible, obstacles need
to be removed, then consequently the public procurement has to
be modernized and digitalized to take full advantage of up-to-
date IS/IT (Zelazny & Pietrucha, 2017), to make the entire
process more transparent and simple, while addressing as well
sustainability criteria (Sroka & Lörinczy, 2015, Sroka & Szanto,
2018, Cech et al, 2019) such as social and environmental aspects
(Dima et al., 2018, MacGregor Pelikánová, 2019a). In sum,
public investment via public procurement needs to contribute to
the concept of public goods (Czyzewski et al., 2016).
Not only the EU, but as well the United Nations (“UN”) have
identified that there is a gap between public services and social
needs and that a collaboration across multiple stakeholders is
one of the key goals for securing global sustainable development
with social, environmental and economic progress and UN
Sustanainble Development Goals (SDGs) (Berrone et al., 2019).
One academic stream strongly litigates for public-private
partnership (“PPPs”), while for others PPPs remain a
controversial proposition due to the complexity and limitation of
current systems (Berrone et al., 2019, O´Shea et al., 2019). In
general, the EU decided to opt for the public procurement.
Indeed, public procurements have been high on the agenda of
policy makers, decision makers, scholars, and the general public
in the EU in the last few decades, inasmuch as such
procurements make up nearly one-fifth of Europe's total gross
domestic product (Milosavljevic et al., 2019)
Therefore, contracting authorities across the entire EU should
show a vigorous commitment to the public procurement and
address both quantitative and qualitative aspects in the virtual
setting, i.e. consider the smallest price as well as other factors
such as innovative, energy saving solutions or insisting on
sustainable and socially inclusive approaches (EC, 2017).
Interestingly, despite the above indicated EU framework and
policies, there have been just a few completed studies
comparatively assessing and measuring the effectiveness,
efficiency and sustainability of public procurement in EU
member states, and this e.g. by using the composite I-distance
Indicator (CIDI) methodology (Berrone et al., 2019,
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