Subjects:

Constitutional and Administrative Law

Contents:

1. What is this book about?

Part I: Preliminaries

2. Roots

3. Status Equality Law and Policy

4. International and European Procurement Regulation

5. Buying Social Justice?

Part II: The World Trade Organization and procurement linkages

6. Contract compliance in the United States and Canada

7. Set-asides in the United States, Canada

8. Evolution of the Government Procurement Agreement Model and procurement linkages

9. Procurement linkages and developing countries

Part III: Equality Linkages and the European Community

10. Procurement linkages and the 1980s reform of EC procurement regulation

11. Domestic procurement linkages during the 1990s and the chilling effect of European procurement regulation

12. Changing approaches to procurement linkages in the Community and beyond

13. Expansion of equality linkages in the Member States

14. Procurement linkages and the 2003 legislative reforms: a modus vivendi in sight?

Part IV: Interpretation

15. Interpreting the Government Procurement Agreement

16. EC public procurement law and equality linkages: foundations for interpretation

17. European public procurement law and equality linkages: government as consumer, government as regulator

Part V: Conclusions

18. Reconciling social and economic approaches to public procurement

Governments spend huge amounts of money buying goods and services from the private sector. How far should their spending power be affected by social policy? Arguments against the practice are often made by economists - on the grounds of inefficiency - and lawyers - on the grounds of free competition and international economic law. Buying Social Justice analyses how governments in developed and developing countries use their contracting power in order to advance social equality and reduce discrimination, and argues that this approach is an entirely legitimate, and efficient means of achieving social justice.

The book looks at the different experiences of a range of countries, including the UK, the USA and South Africa. It also examines the impact of international and regional regulation of the international economy, and questions the extent to which the issue of procurement policy be regulated at the national, European or international levels.

The role of EC and WTO law in mediating the tensions between the economic function of procurement and the social uses of procurement is discussed, and the outcomes of controversies concerning the legitimacy of the integration of social values into procurement are analysed. Buying Social Justice argues that European and international legal regulation of procurement has become an important means of accentuating the positive and eliminating the negative in both the social and economic uses of procurement.