Supporters believe that from the perspective of protecting the interests of investors, winning the bid at a low price is an inevitable choice for the market economy. However, how to ensure the project quality by winning the bid at a low price seems that the proponent can't find an effective method under the premise that most of the project investors are countries.
Opponents make a fuss about the quality of the project, arguing that adopting the system of winning the bid at a low price will inevitably lead to vicious competition among construction enterprises, which will eventually lead to the failure to guarantee the quality of the project, or cause a large number of "fishing projects". The bidder first obtains the project contracting right at a low price, and then bargains with the owner during the construction process, and the final settlement price far exceeds the contract price. In addition, opponents also believe that winning the bid at a low price will further worsen the living environment of construction enterprises, bankrupt some state-owned enterprises and bring unstable factors to society.
The author has been engaged in bidding in power industry for 10 years, and has a deep understanding based on his personal practical work experience and understanding of international project bidding. In the current environment of China, it is not suitable to adopt the internationally accepted low-price bid-winning method for project bidding. The main reasons are as follows.
First, China's unique investment subject structure.
Bidding is an out-and-out market behavior, and the original intention of bidding is to effectively protect the interests of investors. As the funder, investors hope to have an effective method to determine the reasonable project cost. However, in the case of asymmetric information, investors generally have no engineering experience. On the one hand, it is difficult to effectively reduce the price through negotiation, and on the other hand, the cost is high. In this case, the project bidding is generated by drawing lessons from the auction of goods. From the Fidyk contract model of the World Bank, we can see that the fundamental purpose of bidding work is to put the interests of investors first. Suppose that in a market, the interests of investors cannot be effectively protected, then no one will be willing to invest soon, which will eventually lead to the shrinking of the market. In a complete market economy, investors are often private investors, even investors like the World Bank are basically composed of consortia from various countries. These scattered investors are most concerned about income, and high-risk investments will make them flinch. In this case, protecting investors means protecting the market, and governments all over the world are very determined to protect investors.
On the other hand, in China, the investors of large-scale capital construction are mostly large enterprises controlled by the state or the state. Such investors have little or no impulse to reduce costs. Therefore, in our country, bidding is never a spontaneous act, but a compulsory act of the government. From 1979, according to the requirements of the World Bank loan, to the current implementation of the "Bidding Law", all reflect the mandatory nature of project bidding in China. It is no exaggeration to say that if there were no compulsory measures by the state, the bidding market in China would disappear. In the case of spontaneous demand, the purpose of investors is clear enough: to achieve economic optimization, that is, to invest the least on the premise of ensuring quality. In order to ensure this, the free market will eventually force the tenderee to be "open, fair and just". On the other hand, enforcement, the original intention of the rulemakers is of course good, but the implementers have their own independent will. No matter how perfect the rules are, there will always be some loopholes in the implementation process.
In addition, the main investors in China's engineering construction are basically some industry authorities in the original planned economy era (the restructured enterprises still have this nature). After the implementation of project bidding, it is natural for these departments to give up some of their original management functions, which takes a long process, especially in China, a country with a long feudal tradition. The original subordinate construction enterprises of these industry departments are unwilling to lose their original "protection". They rely on the countless ties with the competent authorities to try their best to influence the investment department and make the bidding work biased towards themselves in the specific implementation. However, the competent authorities often find out various reasons to protect the construction enterprises in their own industries out of affection. Of course, the bidding rules formulated in such an environment cannot be based on winning the bid at a low price.
Two, failed to establish an authoritative technical supervision mechanism
There is a prerequisite for winning the bid at a low price: the bidding scheme must be evaluated correctly, and domestic bidding has not done enough in this regard. When choosing the technical bid, they often go through the motions or score according to their own impressions, but fail to make a comprehensive and serious evaluation of the scheme design of the construction unit.
The main reason for this phenomenon is the unreasonable design of the existing expert database system. The members of the expert bid evaluation team (including investor representatives) are randomly selected from the expert database, which ensures the fairness of bid evaluation from one aspect. However, the classification is unclear or not detailed enough, and experts don't understand the problems outside their own majors, so they can't make a reasonable or unreasonable evaluation of construction design. For example, it is entirely possible that all substation electrical installation projects are experts outside the electrical profession when evaluating bids. Although power engineering has its interoperability, it is really difficult for civil engineers to make a pertinent evaluation of electrical technical schemes. The expertise of experts is useless in bid evaluation. When experts can't judge the quality of a technical scheme by experience and common sense, as a member of the bid evaluation team, they must give a conclusion. It forces experts to find fault only in the packaging and layout of technical tenders, which is a major drawback of the current bidding system in China.
In addition, most of the experts in the bid evaluation team are not representatives of investors, nor are they hired by investors. It is hard for us to imagine that they will be truly responsible to investors without binding conditions. The strength of this sense of responsibility is often related to whether we can argue endlessly about interests. On the contrary, most of our experts follow the crowd, are not clear about ambiguous issues, are afraid of heated debates, and are somewhat indifferent to the evaluation results of technical targets. Why? Because they don't need to be responsible for their actions, the selected scheme won't win any prize no matter how good it is, and no matter how bad it is (as long as there is no big accident), it won't hurt their interests, or even have little impact on their reputation.
On the other hand, investors rely heavily on technical experts in international bidding. How to find a qualified and capable expert group, investors do not need to spend too much energy, there are enough bidding consulting companies to choose from in the market. These consulting companies are completely independent of investors. They are employed by and responsible for investors. However, in the case of completely asymmetric information, how can investors effectively control consulting companies? Market rules play a key role, and consulting companies that can't satisfy investors will soon be eliminated by the market. Qualified consulting companies reserve a large number of professionals to meet the needs of different types of engineering construction. These experts not only have a good knowledge reserve, but also have rich field experience, and can basically identify the fraudulent behavior of construction units.
Investors certainly want the project cost to be as low as possible, but to ensure the project quality, they must ensure the corresponding investment. This is a paradox, investors can only pursue balance in this paradox, and one-sided emphasis on any one of these factors will only be counterproductive.
Internationally, the evaluation of construction design by technical experts is very important and an important indicator of bid evaluation. Therefore, the investor's requirements for the depth of understanding of the technical scheme by the expert group are by no means comparable in China. For example, the Lubuge Hydropower Project, one of the earliest investment projects of the World Bank in China, was quoted by the Japanese side about 60% lower than the Chinese side. If it's put in China, it's a waste label. As a result, the expert group demonstrated that the construction technology was really advanced and completely feasible, and finally the Japanese side won the bid. Therefore, Lubuge Hydropower Project has become a milestone in the history of China's project bidding.
Third, the tendentiousness of the tenderer.
Although it is clearly stipulated in "Bidding Law of People's Republic of China (PRC)" and "Interim Provisions on Bid Evaluation Committee and Bid Evaluation Method" promulgated in 2000 that the lowest bid price method and comprehensive evaluation method can be used for bid evaluation, it is extremely rare to actually adopt the former method. The reason is that the former is too objective, which makes it difficult for the tenderee to control the bidding results, while the latter scores more than one third, which makes the tenderee's operating space much larger. At present, it is not uncommon for bidders to violate the principle of fairness. Some bidders do not meet the requirements, and the members of the expert group are appointed by themselves; Others list some clauses that are obviously beneficial to individual units in the bidding documents; In other cases, the investor's experts clearly expressed their support for a tenderer when evaluating bids.
The tendentiousness of the tenderee comes from the following three reasons: First, sacrificing price to ensure quality. Within the scope permitted by the policy, the tenderee is unwilling to bear any quality risk, which leads to the distortion of the project cost performance. Our country adopts lifelong responsibility system for project quality, but the corresponding restrictions on project cost are not strict. "Spend money to ensure quality" is the most popular slogan in the construction industry, which seems reasonable, but in fact it is a great waste, and it also opens the door for "power rent-seeking" in engineering construction. You don't have to be responsible for how much money you spend, and the money is not your own, so investors naturally won't feel bad; Secondly, the tenderee considers the construction enterprises in the industry. As mentioned above, in the case that the industrial sector is the investor, its subordinate construction enterprises will inevitably have a certain impact on the decision-making of the tenderee by virtue of their good relations with the competent authorities for many years. Perhaps this is not the original intention of the tenderer, but it is really hard to avoid in practice; Finally, it is "power rent-seeking". The more objective the evaluation criteria are, the more difficult it is to carry out rent-seeking activities. If only the "lowest bid price" is used as the bid evaluation standard, investors' ability to control the bidding results will be greatly reduced, which means that the winning bid will be completely decided by the market. The power of investors will be greatly weakened, and the cost of "trading power and money" will be greatly increased. Therefore, in recent years, although the state has repeatedly asked investors to talk about specific bidding work, this is the reason why investors are unwilling to hand over their rights.
From the above analysis, it can be seen that the fundamental reason why China's current project bidding can't be in line with international standards lies in the unreasonable investment structure in China. In fact, privatization has become a global trend in the 1920s, and some sectors and industries that some economists think are not suitable for privatization are also involved. Such as telecommunications, national railways, etc. As for the power and energy industries, some countries, such as the United States, have never had a state monopoly. In industries monopolized by the state, there is no complete market competition, because the government, as the spokesman of state-owned assets, will inevitably intervene in the market consciously or unconsciously, and the legitimacy of its behavior is beyond doubt. After 20 years of reform and opening up, most markets in the economic field have reached or approached the state of free competition, but in some so-called key industries, such as telecommunications, electric power and railways, free competition is far from starting.
After China's entry into WTO, the demand for market openness is getting higher and higher, and how to integrate project bidding with the international market has become an urgent problem. Obviously, it is impossible to solve all problems in a short time, such as changing the investment industrial structure. As far as the current project bidding is concerned, there are still many places that can be improved: First, strengthen legislation and formulate corresponding management regulations according to some problems in bidding work in recent years. For example, it is stipulated in detail that investors shall not have any favoritism and shall not have any form of bonus points. Second, vigorously develop bidding consulting institutions, and must ensure their neutrality. It is strictly forbidden for investors to buy shares or set up bidding consultation institutions in any way. The third is to further subdivide the bidding market, with different scales and different construction enterprises. Minimize bidding methods such as inviting tenders or negotiating tenders, prevent "insider operation" and increase the proportion of open tenders. Generally speaking, it is necessary to push China's project bidding work to a new level.
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