Public Procurement: Challenges and Opportunities for the Caribbean

Course Description

The course introduces the issues of relevance to the conduct of public procurement, which accounts for some 30% of GDP in the Caribbean.

It discusses how procurement can be used to promote sustainable economic and social development, as well as safeguard the environment, while ensuring transparency, competition and integrity in the award of public contracts.

The course covers the full procurement cycle as well as recent innovations in procurement policy, such as public private partnerships and e-procurement. The regional and international trade dimensions of procurement policy are also covered. These modern public procurement strategies are generally addressed as they apply in international best practice, as well as examination and analyses of their suitability/adaptability to the Caribbean context.

The entire course is grounded in the specific conditions in small, developing and vulnerable economies, as the relevance of the broader canon of literature of public procurement, which has a larger
developed economy context will be interpreted in the Caribbean context.