Looking Into the Public Procurement Data Space and eForms

This article explores the Public Procurement Data Space (PPDS) and eForms, two recent development designed to improve data collection in public procurement in the EU. It shows that both the PPDS and eForms, as currently designed and implemented, improve to an extent data completeness and quality. Nonetheless, such improvements will be limited and not enough to enable a data-driven policy for public procurement as anticipated by the Commission. This is essentially due to the limitations imposed by the existing procurement regulatory architecture as well as a misalignment of incentives between what the Commission wishes to achieve and what work the Member States and contracting authorities will have to undertake.