Why are there no EU-wide figures on how many bids public tenders receive?

Because the one EU-wide source that carries the field does not carry it consistently, and we tested that rather than assuming it.

TED, the EU's notice journal, publishes a received-submissions count on award notices, so in principle every member state above the EU thresholds could be counted the same way. Reading seven months of award notices for three countries, 10,000 Italian, 4,443 Portuguese and the French set, shows why the principle does not survive contact: TED holds two different count fields, total tenders and tenders submitted electronically, and which one is trustworthy changes by country. France's total-tenders field reports zero on 15.4% of lots while its electronic field reports zero on 3.1%; Portugal is the mirror image, 2.0% against 18.0%. A zero on an award notice is impossible, because an awarded contract received at least one bid. In Italy the two fields disagree on a third of the notices that carry both, and the single-bid rate comes out at 33.3% or 30.0% depending purely on which field the analyst picks. Any headline built on that measures how buyers fill in a form, not how contested a market is. So the figures published here come from national registers that publish outcomes completely, Portugal, France and Colombia, and the countries without such a register are listed as not measured instead of being estimated.