The Rearch On Greener Public Procurement

Green public procurement (GPP) is officially regarded as an effective means to secure environmental improvement. For many countries globally, public procurement represents a significant proportion of the economy. It’s estimated that public entities in the developed counties purchase goods and services corresponding to approximately15-25percent of annual Gross Domestic Product. Because of their considerable purchasing power, public authorities are often regarded as having the power to promote sustainable development by stimulating firms to invest in sustainable production technologies through Green Public Production policy and legislation. Since the establishment of government procurement system in China, the government procurement amount goes up dramatically. Using public procurement to achieve environmental goals is increasingly considered by China’s public authorities. The goal of this dissertation is to develop an economic framework with which to evaluate and identify the strengths and weaknesses of GPP as an instrument of environmental policy, assess the current procedure of green public procurement in China and try to develop an effective way to improve environment protection function of green public procurement.Within a framework of welfare economics, we analyze the appropriateness of GPP as a welfare-enhancing policy tool and how to implement it as such. The fundamental point of environmental policy is that it should encourage resources to be allocated in such a state that welfare is maximized. We start to evaluate green public procurement with the perspective of cost efficiency and market competition condition. Compare it to other tools, such as taxes, we found that GPP is not a cost efficient environmental policy tool in practice. GPP’s potential effect on market competition also is difficult to establish. But we found green public procurement have some advantages over other environment policy tools. Comprehensive environmental policy development should emphasis the strengths of each instrument, while moderating their weaknesses. At the basis of the above discussion, we found it’s hard to predict environment effect of GPP. One important reason is that the procurement process involves many dimensions, any difference of them will lead to different procurement results. For example, two biddings which have the same procuring objectives will result different environment performance due to different scoring method for environment criteria. It concludes that we should pay more attention to the design of procuring procedure, method and contract terms in order to use GPP to protect the environment effectively.Nowadays, the unprecedented political and legal environment is beneficial to develop green public procurement. Although we have established initially GPP procedure, method and skill, the current systems are flawed in a number of ways. For example, the implementing effect of the Energy Conserve Product List and Environment Label Product List is doubtable; the compulsory procurement system has too strong an effect of exclusion which violates China’s Government Procurement Law. The existing procuring management and organization weakened the effectiveness of GPP. To effectively implement the green procurement policy and better exploit the potential of green procurement, it is submitted that the current green procurement policies should reform to extend procuring procedure and expand procuring scope. It’s necessary to develop a green public procurement directive to direct the procurers’behaviors.