Towards improvingthe effectiveness of the public procurement rules of Bangladesh:lessons from the United Nations procurement manual

Abstract

Bangladesh is a country that has already been graduated as developing country. It needs robust and sustained economic growth in order to maintain that economic position. To this end, for bringing out discipline in the procurement management of Bangladesh, Public Procurement Regulation 2003 has been promulgated. Later on PPA- 2006 and subsequently PPR-2006 have been promulgated and Public Procurement Regulation has been repealed. The public procurement of Bangladesh has been regulated by PPA-2006, PPR-08, and standard tender documents/standard request for proposal. The provisions of these instruments are kept changing based on the reality. All the procuring entities in the public sectors come under the purview of those above mentioned act and rules. These act and rules are very comprehensive and cover almost every aspect of national and international procurement. On the other side, the UN has its own procurement manual based on which UN procure and acquire its goods, works and professional and intellectual services. The latest version of UN annual has been released on July 2016. As this is an famous procurement manual in the contemporary world. Bangladesh may take some clues and lesson from this manual. To this end, the current study is attempted. By using the methods of comparison, it is found that there are certain areas where the provisions of the UN manual differ from that of the PPR. And there are several areas where both of these instruments annotate the same thing. The new knowledge area like the disposal policy of the asset is not included in PPR, where as it is included in the UN procurement manual. It’s a very common practice in the developed world to consider the total cost of ownership at the time acquisition of the asset which is not currently included in the PPR-2008. In the study, it is found that there are many instances having the same echo regarding the procurement management, while there are other field also having different view.