E-procurement in Contracting-out of Public Goods and Services: Evidence from Slovakia

Recently growing attention has been paid to the issue of public-sector innovation: scholars have progressively developed a fully-fledged field of study in this direction, since remarkable differences exist between public and private organizations. Perhaps paradoxically, the decline of NPM itself from the 1990s onwards has paved the way to further developments of this field of study, surpassing the existent model through the exploration of innovative tools for stakeholders' involvement in public decision-making. New Public Management reforms of public administration combined with the use of information and communication technologies have brought many innovations to the public sector, among others also public e-procurement. Our objective is to identify the driver and barriers of e-procurement use in contracting-out of public goods and services based on analysis in one selected region and its four municipalities in Slovakia. This study uses a qualitative and quantitative approach and is based on original data from our own research, including data collected within the LIPSE (Learning from Innovation in Public Sector Environments) research project. The main findings of our analysis are that the use of public e-procurement is an innovative tool for contracting out the public services and as such facilitates modern public-administration reforms based on information and communication technologies.