Barriers towards foreign firms in international public procurement markets: a review

he international dimension of public procurement has gained inimportance in the last decade and has attracted the attention of economist and policymakers. A number of trade agreements were signed with the intention to removebarriers to procurement markets and favour entry of foreign firms and products.However, empirical evidence shows that, despite the existence of trade agreements,discrimination towards foreign firms still applies in a number of countries aroundthe world. In this paper, we present the methodologies used in the economic lit-erature for the identification of overt and covert barriers to public tenders anddiscuss the importance of collecting high quality data for meliorating the ability ofinternational traders to detect procurement barriers.