Single-bid procurement is a case of public procurement where there is only one bid. In 2015, there were 6,409 such tenders in the Czech Republic reaching total volume of EUR 2 bn. This is the highest number of such tenders recorded so far. Although labelled as highly exceptional form of public procurement, they accounted for approximately 1/3 of all tenders in the country, which places the Czech Republic into a group of the worst performing countries in the EU. The main cause of this development seems to be the effort to quickly tap EU funds at the end of programming period, EconLab study said. Low level of competition was observed in public procurement in the regions, municipalities and universities, too. This type of contract is generally awarded by smaller buyers.

EconLab explains that possible reasons for such a development may include the recent gradual relaxing of
procurement law (looser conditions for the use of a negotiated procedure without publication or removing the explicit ban on awarding contracts if only one bid was submitted), but also lower overall emphasis of contracting authorities on transparency of public procurement.

The study uses the internal database of the company Datlab, which is a cleaned and highly reliable version of data from Czech procurement journal. It has been extensively used for example in the regulatory impact assessment for the currently proposed procurement act. 

Econlab (former Center for Applied Economics) is an Czech NGO affiliated with Institute of Economic Studies at Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic. Its purpose is to conduct and promote data-driven economic research focused on public policies.

Read details in the attached documents (in Czech and English).