The Swedish Public Procuration Process and the Transport Administration

The Swedish public procurement system is well regulated and developed and can also be very hard to understand. The public sector annually carries out public procurements to a large amount of money, and thus constitutes a large part of Sweden’s total GDP. The value of the purchases covered by the procurement acts was estimated at approximately SEK 782 billion in 2018. The purpose of public procurement is to guarantee competition on equal terms, contribute to the efficient use of society's resources and taxpayers' money, while promoting innovative solutions, and have environmental considerations in mind. The purpose of this paper is to examine what the procurement process looks like at one of Sweden's largest authorities, the Swedish Transport Administration (Trafikverket) and if improvements should be made. Questions about how tenders are received and evaluated, about what the market looks like, about what improvements that are desired and about what is good about the procurement process. These questions linked to a trust-based governing will be answered and discussed. The main conclusion that are made in this paper is that the Swedish procurement process require some improvements, but the hard thing is to decide what should be improved. My conclusion is that tender evaluation and the review process are areas that needs the most improvement from the empirical data that I have collected, but other areas came to discussion as well. A discussion regarding the trust-based governing is also included in the conclusion