Willem Janssen  0:00  

Welcome to Bestek, the Public Procurement Podcast. Today, we’re talking about single bidding in the EU and what Vita would change in public procurement practice and law.

About Bestek  0:14  

Welcome to Bestek, the Public Procurement Podcast. In this podcast, Dr Willem Janssen and Dr Marta Andhov discuss public procurement law issues, their love of food and academic life. In each episode, Willem, Marta and their guests search for answers to intriguing public procurement questions. This is Bestek. Let’s dish off public procurement law.

Vitezslav Titl  0:34  

Hi Vita!

Vitezslav Titl  0:39  

Hi Willem. Thanks a lot for having me. 

Willem Janssen  0:42  

Absolute pleasure to have you. And let me start by introducing you. We’re colleagues at Utrecht University, and you’re an assistant professor of law and economics at Utrecht University, but also an affiliated researcher at Charles University, KU Leuven and Vrije Universiteit Brussel, a whole bunch of them. I invited you on this podcast because saw that you did some very interesting research on single bidding. So hence why we’re here. 

Willem Janssen  1:10  

But first off, perhaps an introduction for the listeners that don’t know, the Center for Public Procurement. Utrecht University hosts, I think, a very unique Research Center, which is rooted in law scholarship, legal scholarship and in economic research. So both branches of research are represented, and in that sense, we try to find novel and innovative solutions for issues that society faces through the lens of public procurement. But that also means that lawyers need to work with economists, and economists need to work with lawyers. So maybe my first question to you, Peter, what’s it like to work with lawyers? Legal scholars?

Vitezslav Titl  1:58  

Yeah, it’s inspiring and challenging at the same time. So it’s…

Willem Janssen  2:02  

That’s a very politically nice answer, but keep going, yes.

Vitezslav Titl  2:06  

There are big differences in our approaches, right? I feel like that. Economists very often look just on efficiency, however they define it. They just want to figure out what is the optimal way to do things so that, like, for the same amount of money, you get the most and often, then forget aspects that matter to lawyers, let’s say, like some equity considerations or democracy and issues like that. And actually I think, like, economists can also work with these concepts, because we can think of, yeah, having suppliers from China, which sounds like a really legal issue, but actually if you would think about the future, there are potentially huge costs of being too reliant on China. So I think economists can also think about such issues. We just often forget these and then focus on this kind of limited world of auction theory and trying to explain, like, what is the best mechanism designed to get the most for the least money?

Willem Janssen  3:19  

So I think, I mean, I’m very happy with this answer, because I was also, I considered, when I was thinking of asking this question, is that you would say it’s awful working with lawyers, but I also find it’s very… It’s often frustrating to work across disciplines I find, because you’re talking to people that speak a different language. But I always find that looking back once, there’s been some type of integration, whether that be with economics or geosciences or any type of other type of science, there’s always… You’ve created, it’s one plus one is three, really, rather than just being two. So I’m happy to hear that at the start of this podcast, we can still continue talking, because it would have been rather awkward if you would have said, it’s pretty awful working with you, Willem, but I’m glad that it isn’t, or that you were so kind to not mention it. 

Willem Janssen  4:08  

But let’s move on to a bit of your research focus. If I will read through the work that you’ve published so far. One of the lead motives, or one of the red threads, is definitely public procurement and favoritism and corruption. Could you tell me a bit more about that, and also perhaps what your prime motivation is to be an economist in that field?

Vitezslav Titl  4:33  

Yeah. So I always found politics extremely fascinating. I thought like that. We often talk about markets, and you know how the economy is doing, but without functioning political systems, there is no rich economy, right? If you look, I don’t know, at Norway versus Russia or Venezuela. Yeah, they could be similarly rich, one could say, based on, like all oil reserves, but they ended up in a very different situation. And I think it’s true how this political system in these countries works. And kind of randomly, in Czechia, I got access to the data on political donations because in Czechia, it’s allowed and it’s also reported, like every donation is reported so firms can give money to political parties. And I was like, yeah, this is weird, firms usually don’t have ideologies, right? Maybe their owners do, but like firms themselves, they are there to make money. And one potential outcome, like of giving money to a political party would be some advantage from the party. And then I got also access to data on procurement. And this is how, like, I merged, yeah, my interest in politics with like, procurement is a very important topic, because I didn’t myself know that public procurement accounts for something like 14% of GDP on average in the European Union. And, yeah, coming from Central Europe, where at least we are more concerned about corruption, I don’t think we have very good measures to say which country is really corrupt. There are also papers showing that there is corruption in Denmark, even though they don’t themselves believe it that much, while every Czech is like everyone is corrupt.

Willem Janssen  6:34  

In the Dutch, I think culture or discussions, we talk more about conflict of interests, because we find it unfathomable to think that Dutch politicians or entities could be corrupt, even though research shows that there is also corruption in the Netherlands. But it’s, I think there’s a very interesting research line potential to be developed into think about what how nations view themselves, and I think the Netherlands is very similar to Denmark on that, in that respect, where, also in public procurement, we often look at other countries, right? Oh, no, corruption… that’s Italy, that’s not the Netherlands, right? We have conflicts of interest here. Whereas I don’t think that’s true. 

Vitezslav Titl  7:15  

Yeah, and I think it just changes with how rich the country is. So you can imagine that, if you go even Eastern, more to the East than to Czechia, that there are really politicians, you know, running around with suitcases full of dollars. I don’t think this happens in the Netherlands, maybe with some drug cartel, but not with the corruption we talk about. But I’m sure there is some exchange of favors. There are also, like, these views. Like, yeah, I know this guy very well. They will do it well, so I think I should kind of support them. And I think that people justify it as not doing something that bad, while forgetting that they actually have conflicts of interest.

Willem Janssen  7:58  

Yeah. So that’s really about the definition of corruption, right? It’s, there’s many degrees of possibilities there. Not saying that they’re totally unrelated. But we’ll be looking a bit at single bidding today, right? And perhaps you can string them together at a point. But single bidding, really, all of a sudden, in the last couple of years, is becoming a very important topic, I think, EU-wide, but also in the Netherlands, it’s a public procurement procedure where there’s only one bid. And could you tell us a bit more about why that is? Why is it relevant to research that, or to be interested in and that as society as a whole. Why is it a problem? Why should we even record this podcast? 

Vitezslav Titl  8:47  

Yes, that’s that’s a very good question. And also, like when I started researching single bidding. So really, the situation when there is just one offer for the particular project, people didn’t talk about it much. Only recently, there is this report of the European Court of Auditors that that is a big deal, and there is more discussion. But this started a long time ago in Czechia, for instance, and it’s really not the only example, the average of such contracts was about 23%, even 10 years ago…

Willem Janssen  9:27  

That’s a lot. 

Vitezslav Titl  9:28  

Yes, and this is the average, also for the EU at that time, around 20%. In the Netherlands, I think it’s it’s way less. It’s 13%. But it’s still difficult to think, given what governments buy, what do they buy? Right? They buy road repairs, bridges, some legal IT services, things like that. And it’s difficult to believe that there is just one firm that can build a bridge. It can happen for something very particular, like a medicine with a patent, or some technology that is patented, that you can imagine. But when I look into my data, I find that such products where there is literally never competition, if you look at types of products, it’s really just 2%, 3% of contracts and so not 13, not 20, but 2%, 3% and so we see that most likely, like already from these data, we have too little competition. And competition is usually associated with lower prices, potentially better quality. And this is what I wanted to study, because in the check case, there is a nice reform that I can then use to understand what the actual effects of single bidding are.

Willem Janssen  10:54  

So and ultimately, if I understand correctly, it’s problematic because the system of procurement might not work, right? So that we have these competitive obligations from the law on the EU level, but also on the national level, where we say, look, we need multiple bidders for the whole system to work, for them to feel the urge to run faster, because their competitor might beat them at the finish line, right? Otherwise you may not end up with the lowest price and highest quality. I always think there’s the… 

Willem Janssen  11:27  

But it’s also complicated, and I’d be very interested to hear how you view this, particularly from a sustainability perspective, sometimes when you want to take on this trend-setting role in the market, right? And you say, We want some very innovative busses, right, that have really low emissions. I also think back to the Concordia bus case, a milestone case in public procurement law, where the City of Helsinki was quite ambitious in its award criteria and noted, we want low emissions, and low noise pollution, and the question raised then before the Court of Justice was, is that an issue if there’s only one bidder, and then the court says, No, that’s not an issue from a legal perspective, but also from like a societal relevance or nudging trendsetter type of perspective, sometimes it can be very useful to have one bidder, because then the rest of the market might think, oh, we can’t supply those sustainable busses, so let’s change our business processes, right? So that’s perhaps where single bidding is not problematic. Or do you view that differently? 

Vitezslav Titl  12:37  

Yeah, so I think it really depends on what you want to buy. And there are situations like an architectural competition where maybe you don’t want like every architect in the country working on the same project at the same time and hoping I will get this one. 

Willem Janssen  12:58  

No.

Vitezslav Titl  12:59  

You want to choose someone with a suitable idea to develop it further, and that can be the same for innovation and where it’s a more complicated process, but when you are buying office paper or quite standardized IT system that every country in the EU has, or these roads that I mentioned before, it’s very difficult to think of good reasons why firms should not compete because we know what we want to buy. When we don’t know what we want to buy precisely, then maybe some negotiated procedure with one supplier, maybe advantageous. 

Vitezslav Titl  13:38  

And this is also what you see when you compare like the US and the European approach. Actually, in Europe, we really think of this market as a competitive market, with auctions, with different firms supplying different offers, and then we evaluate the offers in the US, at least at the federal level, there is a lot of procurement contracts with single bid about 40, 45% I don’t know exactly, and that is because the idea is very different. The idea is I have very experienced negotiators, officers with a very good knowledge of the product that will negotiate innovative things that I need to buy, such as for defense. And that’s a very different situation. And I think there, there is space for single bidding, but it’s more like than we think about negotiation with the supplier and defining together the best product, rather than, you know, procuring a repair of a road that 50 firms in the Netherlands can do. 

Willem Janssen  14:39  

So it really also depends on the type of market to say, is single base bidding an issue? Is it problematic, right? Like you note, in the US, there’s not many suppliers that can supply tanks or build airplanes, right? So that makes sense as you already said, there’s already a limited amount of suppliers that can even apply for. And I think also in Europe, when you continue the analogy with the US or the comparison, it’s the internal market setting, right? We have this, this competitiveness per tender, but there’s also still this objective, also from the law, to create an internal market, which creates this additional dimension that you don’t have in the US. But we’ll get back to that a bit, because if I can sum up single bidding can be very problematic, but it also really depends on the on the circumstances, right on the market, and on the specific procurement that you’re looking at. So it’s not just, it’s not just a bad thing. Let’s start with that, but it can be potentially problematic. 

Willem Janssen  15:40  

So let’s continue from there, and then we end up, and you already noted it, this European Court of Auditors Report from the end of last year, which I think particularly in the legal sphere, was somewhat of a, I wouldn’t call an atomic bomb. That’s a bit much, but there was definitely it had some ripple effect, mostly because it was, I think, for an institution that is generally seen as rather conservative, it was quite harsh in its conclusions. And one of the things that it noted was, is that it took or it problematicized the lack of interstate participation in Europe, right? So this internal market objective has that been achieved, very critical of access for SMEs in European tenders and it noted multiple of those conclusions, but one of them, and I think perhaps the most prominent one, was that there was a rather substantial amount of contract with one bidder in the period that they research right between 2011 and 2021 and that also the number of bids had declined in general, right? So not just for single bids. And I feel like in a sense, it’s causing discussions about the suitability of the European public procurement directives at the moment, right? How effective have they been? But I can imagine that also, it says something about the economic nature of bidding in public procurement. How did you view that report? What were your thoughts when you read it?

Vitezslav Titl  17:19  

So I mean, personally, I was very happy that it’s just pointed out, because, like, it’s an issue that some researchers know about, but it doesn’t deserve that much attention, and this really helped in highlighting that we have, we potentially have a big issue. 

Vitezslav Titl  17:35  

Because one thing that my paper shows is that, on average, so this is across different products, on average, the price is about 6% lower if there is, like, at least minimum competition, at least two bidders. And that comes from my research that I mentioned, or you mentioned as well, in Czechia, and I really compare, like, you know, let’s say Amsterdam buying, uh, repair over road versus Amsterdam buying repair of a road, in the situation when there is a law saying you have to have at least two bidders versus there is no such law, yeah, and this sounds very simplistic in a way, like, we will just say there will be two bidders and the whole world will be better. But it is not because the officers, they know that they need to repair the road. They need they know that they need to buy this IT system. So what I understood that they do is that they then as a response to such a reform that enforces competition, they do better market market consultations. They get to know how to define the product, so that they have more potential bids, and the product still serves the purpose they have in mind. They give firms more time to prepare their bids. That’s what I also see that happened in Czechia. So they realized, okay, maybe we just need to give them one more week and they will have time to prepare the bid actually. I also see that they provide a bit longer descriptions of these contracts, so they gave more information.

Willem Janssen  19:15  

So can just maybe take one step back. Can you help the listeners a bit. I also wasn’t fully aware of the legal changes in Czechia, which are not really… Can you just explain the scenario before and after? What happened and what allowed you to make this analysis? 

Vitezslav Titl  19:32  

Yeah, so let me clarify this more in detail. Basically, till April, 2012 we had the same situation as, I guess, pretty much every country in the European Union. If there is one bid, no problem, you can award the contract, nothing happened. But after this date, and it was actually like then reversed. But after. This date for almost two years, the rule was that if you have just one bid, you have to cancel the auction and relaunch it if you want to buy and find bidders. And what I see is that there is really new bidders for the same type of products. There is more competition and lower prices. That’s, if I summarize very briefly, the main results; I see that this reform that looks very simplistic, really led to the outcomes that the government had in mind.

Willem Janssen  20:34  

So it really ultimately spurred, like perhaps better, attention to the design of the public procurement procedure, how you work with interested bidders, because this is also something that, and that’s why I find it so interesting, what you’ve looked at is, in the Dutch context, we’ve had lots of discussion about renovation of a main artery, a major bridge, Van Brienenoordbrug in the sort of west of the Netherlands, if I can generalize, which still feels like a stamp for the rest of the world, but in the Netherlands, it’s very important to note where it is, of course, even though the country’s span is what two and a half, 250 kilometers by 180 I’m probably not getting the figures right, but rather small. And the discussion there was, there was one consortium that signed up for a very significant renovation of a major infrastructural artery. And the question was, ultimately, and I think also that’s why they’re now reevaluating, it is, what was the setup of this tender right? And many market parties more broadly right, not just this specific, specific tender in the construction industry. Note that there’s too many risks to taking on these projects that are substantial and thereby very hard to estimate costs right, and therefore they feel that the government, and I’m paraphrasing a bit, is moving too much risk onto their shoulders, rather than it being an equal division of risk. So in a way, what I gather from your research, is that perhaps moving towards mandating multiple bids to take place would mean that these, also, these decisions about the Division of Risk would be perhaps, you know, have a stronger part in the discussions that that public authorities might have In setting up the tender.

Vitezslav Titl  22:40  

Yeah, I think that just this rule really leads officers to think a bit differently about what they want to achieve, because then they see this minimum level of competition as one of their goals, and that means, as you say, that they may adjust the technical requirements. So I just presented this paper in Turku in Finland yesterday, and one of the professors there gave a very similar example from the Finnish context. He was like, Yeah, we just had this big IT contract for the government where only one firm bid and then ex-post. It was found out that the reason was that there was, like, weird technical specification about the technology that must be used, but the technology was not necessary for the purpose of the system. It was completely independent, like the system was completely independent of which technology is used, but this one sentence in the specification led to having just one bid. And it’s a system for 600 million so any savings there are significant. 

Willem Janssen  23:59  

It’s a very interesting example. And I think it also really relates to this Dutch case that I that I noted. And also I think it really one, it makes me happy that there seems to be an economist out there advocating for more rules, right? It’s very nice.

Vitezslav Titl  24:17  

Doesn’t happen often.

Willem Janssen  24:18  

It doesn’t happen often, like you say, but it’s a… I think what’s interesting about the research that you’ve done is really that, as a minor modification in the law, right? Can do, can have such an extreme effect on how public tenders are set up? Because you could also argue, well, in a sort from sort of, how should I say this? It seems rather artificial to say you need, you always need more bidders. That’s just the law, right? It seems also like you’re perhaps the competition in itself is an objective. But if these are the side effects that occur, and I think I also related to some of the comply or explain provisions we have in Dutch public procurement law, not so much in the EU public procurement directives, but in Dutch public procurement law, we have a lot of these provisions where we say, you know, you can follow the rule, and if you don’t, you need to explain why you’re not going to follow the rule. So a procurement is based on lowest price, you can still have them as an award criteria, but if you apply that methodology, you need to explain why, right? And I think, in a sense, a similar thing, even though I think the the example that you note from Czechia is a bit more stringent, right? But even just having contracting authorities explicitly having to motivate why they make a certain decision, I hope, actually spurs them to think really well about why they made that decision. And I think that’s a very similar way of looking at it. And of course, as us lawyers, we can think about, when is it effective, right? How stringent should it be? Should it be enforceable before court or not? Because one of the critiques in the Netherlands is that, well, these motivations, they’re all rather stock standard. One was, there was one motivation that was created, and then later on, everyone adopted that similar motivation. So, you know, there’s we can look at it bit more closely, but I think what’s, what makes this research a very interesting part of the body of work that you’ve worked on, is that such a minor change can have such a major effect, right? And also, the fact that you’re being invited to multiple countries is that they’re really looking at, you know, this reform in Czechia as perhaps one of the leading examples moving forward, is, I think, interesting in itself. 

Vitezslav Titl  26:51  

Yes, indeed and I think it it just shows that rules can create incentives that would otherwise not be created because, and that is not a big criticism of officers, but what is their motivation? Right? They don’t necessarily benefit from the cheapest bridge. They may have in mind other things, and also they have their experience. They know this is how we have done it for the last 20 years. And so that’s probably not bad, right? Because we do this, there is lots of persistence in such decisions, and introducing this rule just changes the game a bit, because you know that if you do it the same, probably I will again, get just one bid, so I need to rethink, and I think this shock kind of was the major driver behind that, because both officers and firms, on the other hand, they realize now I have a chance. Now it will not be written again the same way as the last 20 years this contract, but now probably they will have to a bit adjust it so that there are some bidders, there is more space for other firms. And indeed, that’s what they took from this in Finland, they want to propose a little bit softer version. So for example, they want to have a database, and as far as I understood, the Ministry of Finance really hired people to to work on that, of types of contracts where maybe this is not the best idea. So it’s not like, really the idea you had, like you have to explain, which I think is also a good suggestion. But more like, let’s have at least some products where we know that this doesn’t make sense to enforce. And then if you are not in this category, then you have to follow the rule. And so this will this, I hope, will also lead to the same situation in Finland that the officers will be like, okay, we never had competition here. Is this really the case that there is just one firm on the market, or do we just do it in the way that there is just one firm on the market?

Willem Janssen  29:07  

So it’s again, about reevaluating, perhaps what you always did, or reevaluating continuously, what the effect is of how you design a public procurement procedure, what effect that has on the market, what type of responses you get, and I think that’s a very notable, or at least important aspect of it, of this whole discussion.

Willem Janssen  29:28  

I feel like we’re in that sense, instantly, also moving towards the dessert section. We’ve had Main, we’ve talked about single bidding. Why is it problematic? We looked at the European Court of Auditors Report, acknowledging, as you noted, perhaps finally, that this is an issue right that needs to be addressed in some cases. We looked a bit at how Czechia has perhaps solved, I don’t know if the issue is solved entirely, but at least it’s, you know, there was some change visible. Let me ask you the question that I always also pose to the participants of the Dutch podcast, of Bestek, De Aanbestedingspodcast, and not the English one that we’re in right now, is if you could change, if you could be the take on whatever position you want, but if you could just decide in this podcast, if you could change one or two or perhaps three things in public procurement practice or law even, what would you do Vita? How would you make the world better?

Vitezslav Titl  30:27  

Yeah, so I will say two things. And one is like, directly about making things better on the market, and the second one is more what I think about the research that we do in procurement and where we should shift. So one thing that I think it’s a big challenge, especially because we have at least in Europe, right there is one directive that rules the laws in all countries, at least they have to be transposed to national systems. But we face very different situation when a procurement officer in Czechia does something, versus maybe in Denmark or Sweden and we have to keep in mind that giving discretion is a good thing when you have an officer that is well educated have personal integrity and good intentions, while when the officer doesn’t have these things, then maybe giving lots of freedom and leeway in making decisions can lead to issues, and I think that’s what we a bit see with sustainability in the public program, and which can be a very good idea. And it’s it’s how it should be. We should take into account externalities in all forms, environmental but, and others. But if you push too much in this direction, and this is what, I think, what the commission is currently doing, then there comes issues. And that’s what we see in our research on procurement, sustainable procurement, in Czechia, with Fredo Schotanus and Ruben Nicolas.

Willem Janssen  32:08

So one, I instantly feel obliged to respond to this. One, of course. I fully also see this balance that needs to be struck in legislation, right? So you mentioned one directive. There’s a couple, right? But the balance is always the same. How much discretion do you leave for contracting authorities to make decision decisions when it comes to public procurement, how many rights do you afford to agree with bidders? Right to file claims. So this balance is there. I think one of the aspects, because it’s a big one, right? You kind of like allure to this move from voluntary green public procurement or social public procurement to more rules, right, more mandatory rules, which would mean that this discretion is to a certain extent, gone right? I think it that’s a big discussion on its own, so maybe we have a topic for another podcast episode later on. But I think there is one thing to be said is, what do you do then, if that discretion isn’t used? Because ultimately, in many cases, we see a very low uptake of sustainable public procurement in the European Union, right? So from a lawyer’s perspective, it’s then very logical to say, well, maybe we should look at changing the law and making it more forceful, I fully comprehend that there’s different perspectives, that there’s different ways of creating societal change, and the way it’s been happening now, in a super fragmented way, lots of different proposals on the EU level I also don’t find very effective or I foresee ineffectiveness in the future. But that’s just, I think, to complement also, like there’s a balance right between what is sufficient discretion and where do we need to force instead of nudge?

Vitezslav Titl  34:02  

Yeah, and I’m afraid that the balance is very different across member states, and that’s very difficult to handle then from Commission and the EU.

Willem Janssen  34:13  

For sure, and I think that’s also what’s finally causing a lot of debate when it comes to these legislative proposals, right? I believe you had two, is that correct?

Vitezslav Titl  34:21  

Yes. And so this is, you know, podcast on public procurement, but I think that sometimes we as researchers in the field of public procurement should take a little bit step back and be like, what do we actually need to procure and what should be done in house, we can also have state-owned enterprises and sometimes it can be a good solution, sometimes it is certainly not. And I think it’s useful to take this step back and consider also like where procurement is needed, and do we have it too much or too little? Because there are big differences. Right in the Netherlands, 20% of GDP spent on procurement, while in some developed country, it’s more like, more like 12% so I think this is also a useful type of thinking, like, what decisions are made when we decide to implement a project? Do we need this… and do we need to procure it, or should we own the company to build it? I don’t argue for owning construction companies. I’m just giving an example.

Willem Janssen  35:28  

Yes.

Vitezslav Titl  35:28  

That there are many decisions that come before procurement procedures come. And these decisions, I feel like, as procurement researchers, we sometimes forget we are sort of like, there is this procurement market, and we will study it, how to do it the best. But many things that influence efficiency, they come even before. 

Willem Janssen  35:50  

I can only agree. So I think, also, I think you’ve touched upon a second podcast episode that we’ll be recording very soon, mostly because this was something that has never left my attention in terms of research. It was part of my PhD at the time, also from a legislative perspective, and I find that in a lot of member states, the appetite for in-house, or public-public cooperation, as you call it, in legal sense of public tasks, the appetite is back. I don’t see a lot more of that happening at the moment. Or at least there’s a lot more discussion, right. Even in the Dutch parliament, that discussion was had where there was no there was no bidder that turned up for OV because OV transport concessions. And I mean, sorry, public transport concessions in Zeeland and the subsequent response was, let’s perhaps do it ourselves, right? Let’s take it up. So very valid point. So maybe one final question from my side, what I was expecting, because we’re talking about single-bidding, is that you would say the rule that we have in Czechia we need to include in the public procurement directives. Is that a good idea?

Vitezslav Titl  36:59  

So I think it’s a good idea. I think what we would ideally do is to look at Finland, how they implement it now, because as far as I know, it’s in the government program. The ministry started working on the actual implementation in the law. So we will probably know quite soon what happened there. And I think the Finnish rule is way more flexible, which may reduce inefficiencies that came with too strict rule. And so after that, I would evaluate and do that, and I think also the report of the European Court of Auditors that we mentioned so many times should be updated based on these things, because we now know what the costs are, we know that it’s something like 6% higher costs. And if the Finnish case is successful, we know that mostly because no one will argue Czechia and Finland are too similar, no other country in the EU will respond similarly. So we will know that also in different contexts, this rule can bring benefits. And so I think I would wait for that.

Willem Janssen  38:11  

All right, I don’t know if we have the time in that sense, because, say, the European Commission takes the reform of the public procurement directives in their up in their work package, perhaps we have new public procurement directives in five years. I’m not saying that that will happen, but you know, at least it’s a discussion point. Six months ago, I would have said, no way perhaps now it is. Let’s hope Finland hurries up, and then we can get that data, and then we can perhaps support the initial argument that you just raised of perhaps including it in the directives is of that being a good idea. Can I thank you so much for your your participation today, Vita in this podcast.

Vitezslav Titl  38:48  

Yeah. Thanks a lot. It was it was really fun. Thank you. 

Willem Janssen  38:51  

Alright, well, as always, we look forward to the responses from our listeners. It was a pleasure having you Vita. This was Bestek, the Public Procurement Podcast.

About Bestek  39:04  

This was Bestek, the Public Procurement Podcast. Do you want to contribute to today’s discussion and share your thoughts on LinkedIn or Twitter? Do you have an idea for a future episode? Write to us at www.bestekpodcast.com.

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