Regulating public procurement in Brazil, India, and China: Toward the regulatory‐developmental state

Abstract Since the 1990s, emerging economies such as Brazil, India, and China have adopted transparency‐enhancing public procurement regulations in line with international norms. Yet they have hesitated to join the World Trade Organization's legally binding Government Procurement Agreement (GPA). Based on the Special Issue framework, this article scrutinizes the underlying domestic and international determinants, and how they influence emerging countries’ positions in two overlapping international procurement regimes. In particular, reform‐oriented state actors, societal pressure, and lesson‐drawing from international templates have induced a strengthening of domestic procurement institutions and turned emerging countries into “promoters” of the international transparency regime. Conversely, the rising powers have remained, to varying degrees, reluctant “spoilers” of the GPA‐based market access regime in order to keep policy space and use procurement for domestic development objectives. The article suggests that this regulatory‐developmental layering of rule‐based governance and interventionist ambitions characterizes the variegated regulatory state in emerging countries.