Data from Commission for the Prevention of Corruption of the Republic of Slovenia: public-to-private transactions

<p>Public spending is often a contentious subject because different political parties have different agendas as to what should be the current national priorities. Of course, the same is true for the public in general. It is thus of interest to determine whether public spending is indeed as biased and capricious as it is often perceived, or whether there nevertheless exist some fundamental principles that guide it. We use data from the Commission for the Prevention of Corruption of the Republic of Slovenia, detailing every transfer of public money to the private sector from January 2003 to May 2020. During this time Slovenia has done business with no less than 248,989 companies. We find that the cumulative distribution of money received per company can be reasonably well explained by means of a power-law or a log-normal fit. We also show evidence for the first-mover advantage, and determine that the attachment rate of public spending to companies over time is roughly linear. These results indicate that Slovenian public spending is to a large extent guided by self organizing principles that, against all odds, go beyond nefarious interests and lobbying.</p>