XClose

UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES)

Home
Menu

The role of favouritism in municipal government contracting

29 November 2018, 6:00 pm–8:00 pm

Construction site Poland

This event is part of the SSEES Research Student Seminar Series. Join us to hear SSEES research students discuss their projects. On the 29th November, Kadence Leung with Double exile: negotiating otherness in the translations and poetry of Valerii Pereleshin and Bence Tóth with The role of favouritism in municipal government contracting.

This event is free.

Event Information

Open to

All

Availability

Yes

Cost

Free

Organiser

SSEES

Location

433
SSEES
16 Taviton Street
London
WC1H 0BW

Companies rely on courts to resolve business debates and ask for financial information before contracting. Courts are low-cost and financial accounts reflect the realities in many developed economies. In the less developed ones, not so much: the underlying trust for contracting comes from personal relationships instead.

Public bodies face the same problems as private companies. In the lack of efficient courts and reliable information on suppliers, they are incentivised to contract with personally known, local companies that they trust. However, this kind of favouritism often hides corruption. Therefore, favouritism in public contracting can be used both in the public interest (alleviating contractual risks) and in the private interest (corruption).

This dichotomy is particularly interesting in municipal governments. They can rely on informal contract enforcement and information on local suppliers. Local politicians are easy to hold accountable as elections make it possible to replace them if they misuse favouritism for corruption. My research tries to dismantle favouritism using detailed data on municipal public contracts and awarded companies from the Czech Republic, Hungary and Sweden.

The other half of this evening will be PhD Candidate Kadance Leung with Double exile: negotiating otherness in the translations and poetry of Valerii Pereleshin.

About the Speaker

Bence Tóth

at UCL SSEES

Bence Tóth is a third-year MPhil/PhD student (part-time) in Politics&Sociology at SSEES. His project is supervised by Dr. Allan Sikk and Prof Alena Ledeneva.