Problems of Imposing Anti-Dumping Measures in Public Procurement

One of core principles of the Russian contract system in the field of procurements of goods, works and services for ensuring state and municipal needs is effectiveness of purchases. It often relates to the economy of budget resources or a difference between an initial (maximum) price and a final price of supply. As the latter decreases, the risks for customers grow due to contraction of opportunities and incentives to provide the declared quality of goods, works and services. In order to mitigate the risk of signing the contract with dumping purchase participant, who has no chance to execute the contract according to specified terms, the legislator introduces anti-dumping measures. However, there is no evidence that such dumping inevitably jeopardizes the customer. Moreover, these anti-dumping measures can even harm to procurement system. Therefore, the purpose of the present Study is to identify possible drawbacks of existing mechanism of the anti-dumping measures. Through the use of statistical methods, the ineffectiveness of the initial (maximum) price criteria for dumping identification in procurement participants’ applications was shown. Then, the proof of anti-dumping measures redundancy in reference to imposing them on significant share of procurement participants. The hypothesis of correlation between the dumping nature of the contract and non-execution or improper execution of the contract was rejected. Finally, the last statistics-based study identified inability of anti-dumping measures to resist limitations of competition in a case of mala fide supplier participation in the purchase. Also, the qualitative descriptions of other problems on the topic were specified, the recommendations of contract system optimization were developed and possible negative externalities of such innovations were discussed.