Government Finance Policies

The UK just announced a £16 billion IT services framework. Six months late, but with teeth this time. In February 2025, the government launched Technology Services 4. Originally expected in October 2024 with a £12 billion value and now expanded to £16 billion. The delay was deliberate. The Procurement Act came into force in February 2025, bringing stricter measures on supplier conduct. This shows a fundamental shift in how government holds suppliers accountable. The Act introduces a debarment list. It can exclude suppliers with a history of bid rigging, price fixing, or anti competitive practices. This is for up to five years unless they demonstrate corrective action. This addresses a persistent problem. For years, government has struggled to enforce consequences when suppliers underperform or engage in questionable practices. What Technology Services 4 covers: → Digital consultancy, service integration, infrastructure management → Cybersecurity, data services, application development → Transformation projects across the entire public sector The timing matters. This follows £3.8 billion on legacy system contracts for HMRC and £1 billion in cloud migration projects. The demand for large scale digital transformation shows no signs of slowing. But success depends on whether departments actually use the new debarment powers. Publishing a list means nothing if poor performance still gets rewarded with contract renewals. The framework provides the tools. Whether the government has the courage to use them will determine if this changes anything. How should government balance accountability with maintaining a viable supplier market? Would love to know your thoughts below. #GovTech #DigitalTransformation #PublicSector

Screen production incentives create activity. When deployed within ecosystems, they create industries. For governments in the GCC and elsewhere building a film sector, that distinction matters. Screen production incentives are a powerful tool. They bring international productions in, boost short term spending, create jobs, and sometimes lift tourism. From the first incentive program in the US in the early nineties, today there are around 120 programmes worldwide at national and regional level, including several in the GCC, and public support for them runs into the billions of dollars each year. But incentives on their own do not build a film industry. They create bursts of activity. If a production attracted by a high incentive arrives and finds no skilled crew, no scalable services, and no real infrastructure, they won't be returning. The production leaves, and the impact leaves with it. The risk is measuring success by the number of projects shot, rather than the capabilities left behind. The real shift happens when rebates sit inside a complete ecosystem that you deliberately design. From a talent perspective: If you invest in attracting and training freelancers, skills grow from project to project, and the talent base deepens. From a funding perspective: If you have a fund that invests in international productions and finances local ones, the pipeline becomes steady instead of sporadic. If you have bridge financing providers, producers can plan more ambitious slates and local companies can scale in a sustainable way. From an infrastructure and services perspective: If you have studios that can see the pipeline growing, they will invest in more advanced facilities. When services like hotels, catering companies, transport operators, post production shops, and casting agencies cluster around production hubs, the destination becomes a repeat choice for producers, and maybe a long term home. And from a regulatory perspective: When regulations and permitting processes are clear, fast, and predictable, time on paperwork shrinks, time on set grows, and the country develops a reputation for being “hassle-free,” which may be the most powerful incentive of all. At that point the incentives become a catalyst. With every production, what remains is stronger talent, more capable infrastructure, more experienced service providers, and a domestic sector that can finance and deliver its own stories. From Saudi Arabia to the UAE and Qatar, the GCC is investing in attracting productions with ecosystems as the end game. The real opportunity now is to accelerate that ecosystem building and move from renting activity to creating an industry. If you are part of building a GCC film sector, where is your biggest opportunity today? #filmindustry #GCC #publicpolicy

The governments who are introducing #supplychain #duediligence rules for companies are themselves major supply chain actors spending trillions of dollars in #publicprocurement. In our new OECD report “Responsible Business Due Diligence and Government Procurement” we run the numbers on the 52 governments that adhere to the OECDs standards on #responsiblebusinessconduct: ➡️ In 2021, these 52 governments spent more than USD 8.3 trillion on public procurement ➡️ Of this total spend, USD 6 trillion (or 73%) was by countries that now have some form of due diligence regulation applicable to public institutions – either through disclosure rules, mandatory due diligence, or product and market-based measures. ➡️ USD 3.4 trillion (41%) was spent by countries that have specific due diligence requirements for public institutions ➡️ USD 2.6 trillion (32%) was spent by countries that have general due diligence requirements, which also implicitly apply to public institutions. This implies that emerging due diligence regulation can play a significant role in aligning public spending with sustainability goals - and that governments are prepared to #leadbyexample. You can find the report here: https://lnkd.in/djhKCJYC Business and Finance at the OECD Thorfinnur Omarsson Lena Diesing Sarah Reso Barbara Bijelic Froukje Boele Carmine Di Noia Elsa Pilichowski Pauline Göthberg

There’s a common misperception that public sector procurement can’t move like the private sector. The University of California Procurement is proving otherwise. UC Systemwide Procurement is reshaping its model around strategic category management, disciplined sourcing, operational efficiency, economic impact, and revenue generation. In FY2025, these efforts delivered more than $400 million in value to the University. The catalyst has been a holistic approach to organizational change—aligning people, process, and technology to shift both mindsets and execution. The result: best-in-class procurement practices grounded in data, strong supplier partnerships, modern systems, and measuring progress against strategic priorities. Public institutions operate under tighter transparency and policy constraints, but the fundamentals of procurement remain constant. When applied with discipline and clarity of purpose, they drive measurable outcomes. I’ve seen this from both sides. Public sector organizations steward large budgets and public trust. When public procurement performs at a high level, it doesn’t just reduce costs, it strengthens institutions and generates meaningful economic impact for the communities they serve.

Following the local elections, it’s worth remembering what councils actually do once the campaigning stops: they spend money — a lot of it on technology, and a chunk of that through G-Cloud, the framework designed to give innovative British suppliers a clearer route into the public sector. That is the theory. The practice looks rather different. Just this week, and not for the first time, I heard from the founder of a genuinely innovative British technology company that has been blocked from the next iteration of G-Cloud. The reason was not poor delivery, a weak product or lack of relevance to public-sector buyers. It was negative EBITDA and a lightly capitalised balance sheet, both of which are completely normal for growth-stage tech companies. It goes without saying that the government should not be cavalier about supplier risk. But there is a difference between a company that is structurally insolvent and one that is investing in product, people and expansion. There is a difference between a supplier whose failure would bring down a critical public service and one offering a substitutable software or data product. This is precisely the kind of domestic scaleup ministers claim to want in the public-sector supply chain. This ‘computer says no’ approach needs to be replaced with something smarter. If procurement rules cannot distinguish between those cases, they will select for the wrong things: incumbency, corporate backing and the ability to satisfy a bureaucratic risk model. They will not select for innovation, and competition will suffer. This matters because public procurement is one of the largest levers government has. If the state wants more British scaleups, it needs to be a better customer to them. If it wants more competition in public services, it cannot design frameworks that only large incumbents can comfortably navigate. If it wants domestic technology companies to grow, it should not tolerate blunt financial tests that keep them out of public-sector markets. Get in touch if you have experienced similar issues with procurement frameworks, financial viability assessments or public-sector buying processes. If there is enough feedback, we’ll launch an evidence session through the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Entrepreneurship.

European defence spending is on the rise, with significant implications for both the economy and the defence industry. EU member states are set to increase their defence budgets by €80 billion ($84 billion) by 2027, pushing total expenditures from 1.8% to 2.4% of GDP. While this boost will provide a tailwind for economic growth, its short-term impact remains limited, with a fiscal multiplier of 0.5 over two years—meaning that every €100 spent on defence would increase GDP by around €50. However, if more spending is directed toward domestic production, R&D, and industrial scaling, its economic effects could become more pronounced. As the chart highlights, Europe’s share of global arms production is recovering after years of decline. With growing pressure to reduce reliance on non-EU suppliers, European defence manufacturers are poised for expansion. The key challenge now lies in how EU nations will fund this spending, with discussions around supranational debt issuance and alternative financing strategies gaining traction. If executed effectively, increased defense spending could not only bolster security but also drive technological innovation, supply chain harmonization, and industrial growth across the continent.

Germans love to complain. Myself included. So let me do something unusual today: say that something is actually moving in the right direction. Back in December 2024, then-Minister of Transport Volker Wissing laid out a concrete roadmap for AAM in Germany. His successor Patrick Schnieder has since signaled he intends to continue on that path. So where're we at? First test corridors this year. Regional operations expanding by 2030. Nationwide commercial operations by 2032. And a market that's projected to more than double to over €1.7 billion by the end of the decade. Is it perfect? No. Is it fast enough? Debatable. But is it progress? Absolutely. Here's the thing: regulation gets a bad reputation in this industry. But the absence of it isn't freedom. It's uncertainty. And uncertainty is what keeps investment out, keeps operators grounded and keeps technology stuck in the lab. What the Bundesministerium für Verkehr (BMDV) is doing is creating the conditions for this market to actually exist: vertiports, airspace integration, legal frameworks, pilot training standards, etc. That's not bureaucracy for the sake of it, but rather the infrastructure that makes commercial flight possible. And for companies like ours, this matters. Volz Servos supplies actuation systems to some of the most advanced eVTOL and UAV platforms in the world today. Every aircraft that gets certified, every route that gets approved, every vertiport that opens, that’s our market becoming real. And why wouldn't we want to enter the market in the country we live in? So today, instead of asking why it's taking so long: well done, Germany. The runway is being built. Time to use it. Ideally with actuators from Offenbach.

No Farmer, No Food: The Unintended Crisis of Pulse Farmers in India!! India's pulse sector is on the brink of a crisis, not due to a lack of production or consumer demand but because of unchecked import policies. These policies, intended to stabilize domestic prices and ensure consumer affordability, while achieved its goal of reducing the prices but continuous extensions of the same even as the harvest season arrived have had the unintended consequence of devastating farmer incomes. The heavy inflow of imported yellow peas, chickpeas, pigeon peas, and red lentils has resulted in price realizations dipping below Minimum Support Prices (MSP). While the yellow peas prices has crashed, lentils prices are substantially below the MSP, pigeon peas prices are just around MSP while the arrivals are picking up and with better crop then the last year prices will go below MSP, similarly the desi chickpeas which are above MSP as of now will surely see a serious dip as the arrivals start coming from domestic crop in March. As the harvest season progresses, the situation risks worsening, leading to long-term repercussions for India’s pulse farmers and the nation’s food security. Urgent Actions Needed in Pulse Policy To address the challenges faced by India’s pulse farmers and stabilize the market, the following measures are recommended: For yellow peas, impose a 50% import duty to curb excessive imports, stabilize prices, and protect domestic farmers, or alternatively, enforce an outright ban by revoking the recent extension of free import notifications to prevent further market disruptions. For red lentils, reintroduce a 30% import duty, as previously implemented in 2019, to safeguard domestic prices and support farmers. For chickpeas, impose a 66% import duty to stabilize the market and implement quantity restrictions during the harvest season to protect prices from falling below the Minimum Support Price (MSP). Lastly, for pigeon peas, impose strict quantity restrictions, limiting imports to 0.4 million tons to prevent oversupply and ensure market stability. The Path Forward The unrestricted import of pulses has created a perfect storm, driving down prices, threatening farmer incomes, and jeopardizing India’s self-reliance in pulses. Without immediate corrective measures, the pulse sector risks long-term destabilization. By implementing strategic import duties, promoting domestic production, and ensuring market stability, India can protect its farmers while ensuring food security. It is essential to remember: No Farmer, No Food. Safeguarding the livelihoods of pulse farmers is not just an economic imperative but a moral one. The government must act decisively to restore balance, protect farmers, and secure the future of India’s pulse sector.

📜 This week in the College of Commissioners: Fertilisers Action Plan📜 The war in the Middle East has once again exposed how vulnerable global supply chains can be. Disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz affect energy markets, fertiliser supply, and ultimately food production here in Europe. It’s no longer viable for Europe to be so structurally dependent on imported fertilisers. Instead, we need a long-term strategy that strengthens European production capacity and accelerates the transition to cleaner, circular alternatives. With this in mind, the European Commission has today presented a Fertilisers Action Plan focused on three priorities: resilience, competitiveness, and strategic autonomy. Three elements stand out in the proposal: 🔹Building a stronger European fertiliser industry Europe needs more domestic production, more circularity, and less dependency. That means supporting investment in low-carbon fertilisers, biogas, biomethane, nutrient recovery, and innovative technologies that reduce emissions while keeping European industry competitive. 🔹 Supporting farmers now We will mobilise substantial support through existing EU agricultural instruments to provide liquidity relief ahead of the next production cycle. We are also giving Member States greater flexibility under the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) to support farmers facing rising fertiliser costs. 🔹 Bringing more transparency and predictability to the market The fertiliser market has become increasingly volatile. Better monitoring, stronger preparedness, and closer dialogue across the value chain are essential. The Commission will strengthen market intelligence and assess how carbon-related costs under CBAM and ETS are passed through to fertiliser and food prices. And let me be clear: suspending CBAM is not the answer. Undermining CBAM would only increase uncertainty for European industry and deepen our dependence on imports from countries like Russia. Europe should respond to global instability by strengthening its resilience — not weakening its climate and industrial framework. This Action Plan is about more than fertilisers. It is about food security, economic security, and Europe’s ability to stay competitive while delivering on climate ambition.

#AI | #Blockchain : MahaAgri-AI Policy 2025-2029 .  The key objectives that the department of Agriculture seeks to achieve through this policy are : 1. Develop and deploy a statewide food traceability and quality certification platform as part of #DPI : Establish a digitally integrated platform that ensures end-to-end traceability of agricultural produce and enables verification of food quality through credible government backed and internationally recognised certifications. Leveraging AI, blockchain, QR codes, and #IoT, the platform will enhance transparency, support compliance with national and international standards, and improve market access for farmers and producer collectives. 2.  Promote Farmer Centric Design and Adoption: Ensure farmers are co-creators in AI solution design by enabling participatory model development, multilingual advisory delivery, and community-based piloting mechanisms 3. Deploy Remote Sensing-Based Engine as a Shared Digital Public Good for the state: Deploy a unified, AI-enabled Remote Sensing Intelligence Engine to serve as a shared digital public good across multiple departments. This engine will process satellite imagery, drone feeds, and GIS datasets to generate high-resolution insights on land use, crop health, water availability, soil moisture, vegetation indices, and disaster risk. 4. Build Digital Public Infrastructure for Agriculture (DPI-A): Operationalize the Agriculture Data Exchange (ADeX), expand weather and soil sensor networks, and integrate with platforms such as Agristack and MahaAgriTech to support AI readiness 5. Mainstream GenAI and Emerging technology across #Agriculture value chain: Deploy context-specific GenAI and emerging technology enabled tools for crop planning, disease and pest prediction, irrigation management, supply chain optimization, post harvest handling, and market access.