ABSTRACT
Public procurement is gaining importance on the trade negotiation agenda, both under the aegis of the WTO and at bilateral level in various preferential trade agreements. These trends reflect the economic importance of public procurement markets in terms of GDP and trade flows, as well as the fact that to date a relatively small part of these markets has been committed internationally, both at the bilateral and multilateral levels. In terms of economic importance worldwide, the size of government procurement spending as measured in the most recent GTAP database 9 amounts to 6–32 percent of GDP. In the EU alone, in 2011, public procurement expenditures including state-owned utility providers stood at €2.4 trillion, corresponding to almost 19 percent of EU GDP in that year (Cernat and Kutlina-Dimitrova, 2015).
