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Self-organization in Slovenian public spending

Private businesses are often entrusted with public contracts, wherein public money is allocated to a private company. This process raises concerns about transparency, even in the most developed democracies. But are there any regularities guiding this process? Do all private companies benefit equally...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Joksimović, Jelena, Perc, Matjaž, Levnajić, Zoran
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: The Royal Society 2023
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10394406/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37538744
http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsos.221279
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author Joksimović, Jelena
Perc, Matjaž
Levnajić, Zoran
author_facet Joksimović, Jelena
Perc, Matjaž
Levnajić, Zoran
author_sort Joksimović, Jelena
collection PubMed
description Private businesses are often entrusted with public contracts, wherein public money is allocated to a private company. This process raises concerns about transparency, even in the most developed democracies. But are there any regularities guiding this process? Do all private companies benefit equally from the state budgets? Here, we tackle these questions focusing on the case of Slovenia, which keeps excellent records of this kind of public spending. We examine a dataset detailing every transfer of public money to the private sector from January 2003 to May 2020. During this time, Slovenia has conducted business with no less than 248 989 private companies. We find that the cumulative distribution of money received per company can be reasonably well explained by a power-law or lognormal fit. We also show evidence for the first-mover advantage, and determine that companies receive new funding in a way that is roughly linear over time. These results indicate that, despite all human factors involved, Slovenian public spending is at least to some extent regulated by emergent self-organizing principles.
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spelling pubmed-103944062023-08-03 Self-organization in Slovenian public spending Joksimović, Jelena Perc, Matjaž Levnajić, Zoran R Soc Open Sci Science, Society and Policy Private businesses are often entrusted with public contracts, wherein public money is allocated to a private company. This process raises concerns about transparency, even in the most developed democracies. But are there any regularities guiding this process? Do all private companies benefit equally from the state budgets? Here, we tackle these questions focusing on the case of Slovenia, which keeps excellent records of this kind of public spending. We examine a dataset detailing every transfer of public money to the private sector from January 2003 to May 2020. During this time, Slovenia has conducted business with no less than 248 989 private companies. We find that the cumulative distribution of money received per company can be reasonably well explained by a power-law or lognormal fit. We also show evidence for the first-mover advantage, and determine that companies receive new funding in a way that is roughly linear over time. These results indicate that, despite all human factors involved, Slovenian public spending is at least to some extent regulated by emergent self-organizing principles. The Royal Society 2023-08-02 /pmc/articles/PMC10394406/ /pubmed/37538744 http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsos.221279 Text en © 2023 The Authors. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Published by the Royal Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, provided the original author and source are credited.
spellingShingle Science, Society and Policy
Joksimović, Jelena
Perc, Matjaž
Levnajić, Zoran
Self-organization in Slovenian public spending
title Self-organization in Slovenian public spending
title_full Self-organization in Slovenian public spending
title_fullStr Self-organization in Slovenian public spending
title_full_unstemmed Self-organization in Slovenian public spending
title_short Self-organization in Slovenian public spending
title_sort self-organization in slovenian public spending
topic Science, Society and Policy
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10394406/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37538744
http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsos.221279
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