The United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL) Working Group I (Procurement) 20th session was held in New York on March 14-18, 2011. This session discussed the proposals for a Guide to Enactment of the UNCITRAL Model Law on Public Procurement (the Guide). Professor Yu An, Director of the SPPM Institute of Government Management and Innovation, attended the session as the representative of the People’s Republic of China.

Prof. Yu highlighted China’s Public Procurement Law and its purposes of improving the financial efficiency of procurement expenditure, which is often explained as saving financial expenditure. The Guide made it clear that the concept of efficiency should also include the social impact, environmental protection, life-cycle cost of product, and contract performance.

Open competition, on the other hand, will lead to repeated procurement through the technical competitiveness of a certain supplier, which will actually cause a monopoly. The Guide described the concept of anti-monopoly, but without an in-depth conclusion and left a large margin for future discussion.

In other areas this session discussed the broadened scope of legal application, which should also refer to the protection of labor and the pursuit of social justice. Prof. Yu appealed to the audience that public procurement could play a more important role in labor protection.