Public Procurement and the Economic Cycle. An Analysis of Unconventional Data for the Austrian Construction Industry

The Austrian construction industry was in a boom phase in 2018. The excellent economic situation brought about above-average capacity utilisation, which was also increasingly reflected in a rise in construction prices. Against this background, the influence of the construction industry on the number and prices of bids in public tenders is of considerable interest. For the study, tender data processed with web scraping and text parsing were compiled into a comprehensive microdata set on public construction contracts in Austria in the years 2006 to 2018, which provides an additional data source for the analysis of economic interrelationships. As the results show, a decrease in the average number of bids per tender is accompanied by higher award prices during periods of economic boom.