Category: OECD

OECD Public Procurement Forum 2025

On July 1-2, 2025, the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) held its Public Procurement Forum 2025, a major international conference to discuss cutting-edge developments in public procurement around the world.

Panelists (L-R) Nicolas Pinaud, Chris Yukins, Gavin Hayman, Filipa Urbano Calvao, Aidan Sweeney & Gillian Dorner

Professor Christopher Yukins (GW Law) joined a panel (listed below) to discuss building public trust through public procurement.

In his presentation, Professor Yukins argued that the principal-agent theory, see, e.g., Michael C. Jensen & William H. Meckling, Theory of the Firm: Managerial Behavior, Agency Costs and Ownership Structure (1976), broadly applied to public procurement for decades, see, e.g., Peter Trepte, Regulating Procurement (Oxford U. Press 2005); Christopher Yukins, A Versatile Prism: Assessing Procurement Law Through the Principal-Agent Model, 40 Pub. Cont. L.J. 63 (2010), offers a means of both predicting and mitigating losses of public trust in procurement.

Professor Yukins argued that the OECD can play a critical convening role, helping the key players in reinforcing public trust — vendors, enforcement officials, members of civil societies and other — address the agency and monitoring problems that can otherwise erode public trust in public procurement.

International Public Procurement Workshop 2025 – South Korea

From 5-7 March 2025, South Korea’s Public Procurement Service hosted an extraordinary conference featuring centralized purchasing agencies from over half of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) member states, from North America, Europe and Asia. The conference presentations, available for download here, addressed next steps for central purchasing bodies, including in sustainability, procurement-for-innovation and artificial intelligence (AI). The program was kindly coordinated by Paulo Magina and Erika Bozzay of the OECD, and was led by Korean Public Procurement Service (PPS) Administrator Lim Ki-keun (left center front in photo below).