Workshop 2 report: Competitive tendering and other forms of contracting-out: Institutional design and performance measurement

Consideration of contracting-out has been a mainstay of Thredbo conferences past, accounting for over half of conference papers. This workshop showed that contracting-out remains an important and vibrant theme, with 32 papers and some 50 participants from 20 countries. Case studies of contracting-out (and variants thereof) were presented at the national level for both bus (21) and rail (6). All stages of the contracting-out life cycle were considered, including design, procurement and management. A focus was placed on assessing key performance indicators and critical success factors and relating these to governance issues, both formal and informal. In particular, the extent to which concepts such as institutional maturity, soft competition and transaction costs could provide new insights was examined. The key finding was that contracting-out critical success factors are highly context specific. In the light of this, recommendations for research topics at future Thredbo conference are made.