Public Procurement Market and the Municipal Waste Management

Public procurement market behaves differently in various sectors. Special case is public procurement market in the municipal waste management, because there is relatively small number of firms and the supply side has rather oligopolistic structure. Additionally, we can find here significant evidence of regional monopolies, which are often supported by ownership of important capital goods - landfills. The result is that the number of bids in the tenders is very limited, which does not bring enough pressure on the tendered prices and thus negatively affects budgets, especially in small municipalities. The paper presents the first results of the analysis of a large sample of contracts for municipal waste collection awarded in the period of 2005-2014 (more than 400 observations). The results of our calculation show, that the situation in the regions is very far from perfect competition. For example, three major companies have on average more than 80% of the market in each region and in only three regions hold at least 10% more than three companies. Moreover, the intensity of the competitive effect is significantly higher than in other procurement markets.