Analysis
How much competition is there?
How many companies actually bid for each public body’s purchases, and how often only one shows up. It is the most cited sign of a captured procurement market, and until now it could not be measured in Uruguay.
42.495purchases checked
40.057published their bidders
29%had a single bidder
4.4bidders per purchase, on average
Read this before the table
The corpus holds over a million purchases and each record is read one at a time, slowly, so as not to hammer a government site. What has been checked is therefore partial and uneven across bodies: that is why every row shows how many of its purchases were checked, and why bodies with a small sample carry no percentage at all. A percentage without that denominator would make the least-checked body look cleanest, which is exactly backwards.
Most single-bidder
1 / 6
How this is measured
- Open procurement data (OCDS) never publishes who bid — only the winner. But the record of each awarded purchase does publish a “Proveedores participantes” block, with each bidder’s document and name. That is where all of this comes from.
- Only competitive procedures are counted (tenders and price competitions). In a direct purchase there is nothing to compete for, so including them would inflate the single-bidder figure while saying nothing.
- A purchase that has not yet published its bidders does not count as a purchase without competition. Missing data and missing competition are different things and are never added together here.
- A high percentage proves nothing on its own: some categories have a single possible supplier in the country. It is a place to start looking, not a verdict.