Autor: Antonio Cusato

Resumen

Using information on public procurement of pharmaceutical products, we analyze tradeoffs associated with restricting competition. Auctions run by the Peruvian government are awarded only if there are at least two bidders. To facilitate the purchase of medicines, authorities introduce a waiver to this policy. Based on the call of procurement processes, which includes those that end in a purchase and those that did not, we document that when competition is required, the probability of having a failed process increases by 6 percentage points. The consequences of these failures are analyzed by looking at the relationship between acquisitions and the health facilities' stocks and consumption for the universe of these facilities and a group of 9 thousand medicines. Using an event study, we show how successful purchases increase the stocks of medicines by 25% and there is a lagged response in consumption of the order of 15%. In failed and repeated processes, consumption and stocks do not respond and the chances of stock shortages raises. On the other hand, the main benefit of competition is lower prices. To analyze price differences between competition regimes, we exploit the variation of international prices of commodities, which directly affect the budget of public institutions in Peru and indirectly the chances of finalizing a purchase. We find that the reduction in prices associated with auctions are reversed by half when the competition waiver is introduced.

Expositor

Antonio Cusato

Investigador del Centro de Investigación de la Universidad del Pacífico (CIUP) y profesor Asociado del Departamento Académico de Economía de la misma Universidad. Es Ph.D. en Economía por Rutgers University (Estados Unidos) y bachiller en Economía por la Universidad del Pacífico. Actualmente, sus áreas de investigación son economía internacional, macroeconomía, política fiscal y economía política. Ha sido investigador visitante de la Reserva Federal de Atlanta (Georgia, Estados Unidos), donde recibió en el 2015 la distinción anual a la mejor disertación doctoral en temas relacionados a América Latina. Previamente trabajó en la Oficina de Evaluación y Supervisión del Banco Inter-Americano de Desarrollo (Washington DC, Estados Unidos), y en el Instituto Peruano de Economía.