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

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.