The Invisible Wall: An Analysis of Metropolitan Procurement Regulations in the United States

• Main Author: Cunanan, Kenneth M
• Format: Others
• Published: Scholarship @ Claremont 2015
• Subjects: Procurement; Metropolitan; Cities; Civic Technology; Regulation; Innovation; Growth and Development; Political Economy; Regional Economics
• Online Access: http://scholarship.claremont.edu/cmc_theses/1058; http://scholarship.claremont.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2025&context=cmc_theses

Across municipal governments, the vast and varied web of purchasing regulations known as procurement has effectively grown into a barrier to entry for the civic technology market, allowing government contracts to be secured by a few large software companies with the resources to move through the procurement process. Within the procurement process, the procurement threshold, an arbitrary dollar amount set by the municipal governments, determines how governments are able to purchase goods and services from vendors. Through an OLS regression model, we examine the relationship between proven economic growth factors within cities, and the city’s procurement threshold. We find that there is a significant negative correlation between the number of patents issued for a particular city and the city’s procurement threshold, indicating that there may be a negative relationship between patent adoption and procurement thresholds within a city.