An Assessment of the Challenges of the Public Procurement Act , A Case Study of the Electricity Company Of Ghana

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2008-06-08
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In most developing and developed countries procurement budgets constitute an enormous amount of national budgets. According to the an OECD report in 2004,worldwide procurement represented over 80% of world merchandise and commercial services export in 1998.Jn the United States procurement expenditure constitutes about 20% of Gross Domestic Products. However despite its enormous impact on countries’ economies public procurement has not been viewed as having a strategic impact in the management of public resources. In Ghana prior to the enactment of the public procurement Act (Act 633), the procurement system was fraught with a lot of challenges. These included the absence of comprehensive public procurement policy, and the lack of a comprehensive legal regime to safeguard the integrity of the public procurement system. The aims of the study therefore were to indentify some of these challenges and investigate to what extent the establishment of the public procurement law and authority has helped to smoothing the public procurement system. The need for the study was derived from the fact that public procurement expenditures exerted so much on public resources, hence the need to ensure measures are put in place to achieve greater value for money. Also studies in other developing economies such as in Guatemala, Colombia and Nicaragua have revealed that tremendous saving made through procurement reforms. In all about forty samples were studied applying both the probability and the non- probability sampling techniques. Most of the various data collection instruments were used. These included Questionnaires, Interviews, and Observation. The study also relied on both primary and secondary data. Some of the major results of the study were that trends are changing very fast in Ghana as well as most developing countries through reforms in public procurement. For example, procurement activities are no more treated as back room activity. There has been an appreciable improvement in the levels of staff handling procurement in most organisations by way of qualifications. The level of transparency in the processes has been enhanced.
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A Dissertation submitted to the School of Business, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, in Partial Fulfillment of the requirement for the award of Master of Business Administration Degree. May 2008
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