Policy Brief 60 - Go European?

Abstract

The European Union market for public procurement is still fragmented. Cross-border participation remains limited, not primarily because of discrimination at the award stage, but due to fragmentation in national supplier qualification systems.

Firms face high administrative costs, duplicative verification, and legal uncertainty when demonstrating eligibility across Member States, which discourages participation before tenders are even submitted.

A European Supplier Qualification Mechanism is thus needed. It would be cost effective, reduce timelines, and would build a market through trust.

Existing approaches, based on decentralised public verification or voluntary private standards are insufficient on all three accounts.

The existing Italian SOA provides a model in which accredited entities perform legally binding pre-qualification under public supervision, producing reusable certificates recognised across procedures and, if adopted at the EU level, across borders.

A European framework for supplier qualification could not only strengthen the Single Market but also provide a credible institutional basis for future strategic procurement initiatives.

Executive Summary 

Forthcoming reforms of EU public procurement coincide with a broader shift toward a more strategic role of the state, in which procurement is expected to deliver sustainability, resilience, innovation and, in sensitive sectors, European preference, alongside value for money.

Delivering on these ambitions depends on an often-overlooked institutional layer: supplier qualification, the verification that a firm meets the legal, economic-financial, technical, and organisational requirements needed to execute a public contract.

The two answers currently in place are both inadequate. Fully public, tender-by-tender verification duplicates checks across authorities, lengthens timelines, and increases ex post litigation, with costs amplified across borders, where documentation must typically be legalised and validated in each host country.

On the other hand, voluntary private standards such as ISO carry no legal effect on market access and offer limited public assurance. Between these poles lies a more promising institutional space: hybrid systems in which accredited private bodies perform verification under tight public supervision, and the resulting certificate is legally constitutive of access to tenders, reusable across procedures, and binding on contracting authorities. In this regard, the Italian SOA system becomes the gold standard.

Empirical findings (Granickas et al. 2026) show that direct cross-border participation remains extremely limited and is deterred mainly by information gaps and administrative duplication rather than by discrimination at the award stage.

Policy attention should therefore shift from the award phase to eligibility, ensuring that participation can occur, and markets can form before award criteria are examined. This paper argues that reforming supplier qualification is an effective way, and perhaps the only way, to address this bottleneck.

This brief addresses this question in two steps. First, it identifies the core performance parameters of an optimal qualification regime — cost efficiency, timeline compression, and market-building capacity through trust and reduction of informational asymmetries. Second, it examines the institutional conditions required to deliver these outcomes at European scale, introducing three cumulative levels of reform — validity, equivalence, and legislative convergence

As argued, reusable, legally constitutive pre-bid qualification reduces public verification costs, compresses award timelines, enhances trust, and sharply reduces litigation. Scaled to EU level, this logic makes hybrid qualification the strongest candidate for a cross-border architecture consistent with a 28th regime for public procurement, while also providing a stable frame to clarify third-country access, today legally ambiguous and de facto open to any bidder.

By aligning the three levels of reform with the optimal qualification system identified, we outline three EU policy pathways: strengthened mutual recognition of qualification evidence, an EU-enabled system of harmonised supplier qualification bodies issuing reusable passports, and the creation of a European Supplier Qualification Authority, together with its qualification entity counterparts, similarly to the role of ANAC and the SOAs in Italy.

IEP@BU does not express opinions of its own. The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the authors. Any errors or omissions are the responsibility of the authors.

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