It is comfortable to assume that a public tender means the same thing everywhere in Europe, because the legal framework broadly does. The paperwork obligations converge, the thresholds are harmonised, the principles are recited in the same order. What diverges, quietly and enormously, is what actually reaches the public record afterwards. Two countries can both be fully compliant and still leave a reader able to answer completely different questions about how their money was spent.
The gaps are not random, and they are not laziness
Look at the two extremes on the same row and the shape becomes obvious. Poland names the winner on every single notice and states a value on none of them. Romania does exactly the reverse: 88% of notices carry a value and not one names who won. Neither is a failure of diligence — both are complete, both satisfy their obligations, and each has simply decided that a different half of the transaction is the public’s business. France publishes a value on one notice in twenty. South Africa names a winner on fewer than three in ten. These are choices about what the record is for, made years ago in different rooms, and they are now the single biggest obstacle to comparing European procurement markets honestly.
Sorted by how often a notice bothers to say what the thing costs, the drop is not a gentle gradient. It runs from everything to nothing, and the countries at the bottom are not the expected ones.
| Market | Winner named | Value stated | Bidder count |
|---|---|---|---|
| Spain | 100% | 100% | — |
| United Kingdom | 100% | 86% | — |
| Norway | 100% | 49% | — |
| Poland | 100% | 0% | — |
| Finland | 90% | 58% | — |
| Lithuania | 86% | 45% | 22% |
| Latvia | 81% | 60% | 0% |
| France | 80% | 5% | — |
| Germany | 58% | 15% | filled, but 84% are zeros |
| South Africa | 29% | 2% | — |
| Romania | 0% | 88% | — |
The field nobody publishes
The most revealing column is the one that is almost entirely empty. How many suppliers actually bid is the single most informative number in procurement — it separates a contract that was competed from one that was merely advertised — and it is missing nearly everywhere. Lithuania carries it on 22% of notices, which is thin but real and usable. Germany appears at first glance to be the exception, with the field populated on essentially every record; on inspection, 838 of 996 of those values are zero, which is a placeholder for ‘not stated’ rather than a finding about bidding. Latvia is the loss: it published bidder counts on 17% of notices historically and has published none since the early summer. Whatever changed there closed one of the two windows in Europe through which competition could be measured at all.
What this does to every ranking of European procurement
Any league table comparing European procurement — competition, value for money, supplier diversity — is built on whichever countries happened to publish the relevant field, and then presented as though it described a continent. It cannot. A study of single bidding across Europe is, in practice, a study of the handful of markets that record bid counts. A comparison of average contract values silently excludes Poland and France. The honest position is not that some countries perform worse than others; it is that most European procurement is unmeasured, and the countries that publish more end up looking worse precisely because their problems are visible. Transparency is being punished by the measurement, which is a strong argument for fixing the measurement.
Poland names every winner and prices nothing. Romania prices almost everything and names nobody.
WHY IT MATTERS
Cross-country procurement statistics are built from whichever markets happen to publish the relevant field, then presented as a portrait of a continent. What each market omits determines what can be known about it: Spain shows the size of an opportunity but never how contested it was, Romania shows the money but not who took it, Poland shows the winner but never the price. The uncomfortable consequence is that markets publishing more appear to perform worse, because their problems are the visible ones — transparency is being penalised by the measurement. Widening what is published, particularly the number of bids received, would cost little and is the single change that would make European procurement comparable at all.
Data: Otnox — live procurement intelligence across 56 markets. Basis: field completeness across published notices, measured per market over the same recent window, 2026-07-20..2026-07-26.
