MICRO BUSINESSES PARTICIPATION IN PUBLIC PROCUREMENT: EVIDENCE FROM UKRAINE

The purpose of this study is to test 3 hypotheses concerning the participation of private entrepreneurs in a procurement made via Ukrainian online public procurement system ProZorro. The research based on the ProZorro professional analytics module which is an online instrument for aggregation, sorting and other processing of machine-readable data on public procurement in Ukraine and uses data as of 2017 (the first year of ProZorro operations). The article uses the methods of systematic scientific literature analysis, general and logical analysis, comparison, summation and abstraction as well as mathematical and statistical processing methods. Situation analysis is based on the data of ProZorro professional analytics module and the State Statistics Service of Ukraine and the results of statistical calculations. The first hypothesis suggests that private entrepreneurs are most active in sub-threshold (small) procurement procedures and this hypothesis was refuted by the results of the study. We found that private entrepreneurs are the full-scale participants of competitive procurement procedures and are actively involved in over-threshold (large) competitive procedures. The second hypothesis assumes that participation of private entrepreneurs in public procurement would increase the competitiveness of procurement procedures, and this has been fully confirmed by the obtained results. The third hypothesis concerns territorial localization of private entrepreneurs' activities. It was suggested that private entrepreneurs are more active locally, i.e. more involved to the procurement procedures conducted by government authorities within their own region, and this hypothesis has been confirmed only for the simplest procurement procedures namely contract reporting.