Mexican Government

Contract Assignment
Gerardo Hernández Galaviz
Abstract
Has the new Mexican government improved its procurement process? Using a
dataset of government’s institutions contracts a graphical analysis was performed
to answer the question. The findings were not promising, and the new government
must correct its path in their 4 years remaining if they want to achieve their goal of
eliminating the once rampant corruption.
Motivation
Transparency in government expenditure is key to make sure that political
representatives are using the contributors’ money in the best interest of the
country.

México started a new government in 2018 that clearly stated that eliminating
corruption is a top priority in its agenda. Analyzing the expenditure of the regime is
crucial for the countries’ citizens to understand if the political party in charge is
walking the talk and disrupting the once rampant corruption.
Dataset(s)
The dataset is named Mexican Federal Government Procurement Data, it was
obtained through Kaggle and the provenance of the information is from the
Transparency government page.

The dataset included data from government contracts assigned from 2018 – 2020,
amount, state and institution that purchased, contract number, value, type of
procedure, contract dates, and explanation of the product or service contracted.
Data Preparation and Cleaning
After initial exploration of the data the following actions were taken to clean the
data:

● Force value types to float and drop missing values in the column corresponding
to the amount $ assigned per contract

● Convert date column to datetime format

● Drop all the rows where there’s a duplicate contract number

● Replace text data in a column to facilitate grouping for the analysis

Research Question(s)
Has the current Mexican government improved government procurement by
assigning more contracts through public tender instead of direct assignment?
Methods
The dataset was aggregated into procedure type and date, then the aggregated
data was displayed graphically to show proportions between procedure types and
progress over the years.
Findings
The initial exploration of data shows that there’s
mainly contract information for 3 years: 2018,
2019, and 2020.

Year 2018 corresponds to the last year of the

previous government of Enrique Peña Nieto
(EPN) and 2019 & 2020 to current government
of Andres Manuel López Obrador (AMLO)
Findings
There are 4 types of procedures for assigning contracts:
● Direct assignment – not desirable and leads to corruption
● Public tender – fair way to compete with providers
● Invitation to at least 3 people
● Other
Findings
An analysis done by procedure type shows that
direct assignment is the most used procedure to
assign contracts, but public tender and invitation
to at least 3 people contracts represent the most
amount of money
Findings
The study of amount of money awarded by
procedure type over the years shows:
● Direct assignment contracts increased 2.8x
from 2018 to 2020
● Public tender increased 1.4x from 2018 to
2020 (with a peak in 2019)
● Invitation to at least 3 people increased 1.9x
from 2018 to 2020
The year 2020 is the only one where more
money has been awarded in contracts through
the direct assignment procedure
Findings
Another review of number of contracts awarded
per procedure type over the years shows that:
● Direct assignment contracts have decreased
0.6x from 2018 to 2020
● Public tender decreased 0.7x from 2018 to
2020
● Invitation to at least 3 people decreased 0.5x
from 2018 to 2020
Limitations
The data source is limited and only contains useful information for 3 years.
Information from previous years would give a clearer picture of contract
assignment.

It is not known why contract numbers where repeated so often in the dataset and
it is key to review the reason before giving a definitive conclusion
Conclusions
The current government has not improved its procurement process in its first 2
years of government because: 1) amount of money in direct assignment contracts
has increased 2.8x versus 1.4x of public tender from 2018 to 2020 and 2) amount
of contracts in direct assignment decreased 0.6x versus 0.7x of public tender from
2018 to 2020.
Acknowledgements
Ivansabik user from Kaggle for his dataset

Carlos Hernández for helping me with questions Python and starting me in the
path of learning data science
References
Mexican Federal Government Procurement Data:
https://www.kaggle.com/ivansabik/mexican-government-contracts/metadata

Plataforma de Transparencia:
https://www.plataformadetransparencia.org.mx/web/guest/inicio

El gobierno de AMLO entregó 8 de cada 10 contratos por adjudicación directa en

su segundo año:
https://www.infobae.com/america/mexico/2021/01/11/el-gobierno-de-amlo-
entrego-8-de-cada-10-contratos-por-adjudicacion-directa-en-su-segundo-ano/