Quality of Road Construction Projects in Sweden between 1990-2010

Hans Lind (), Han-Suck Song () and Abukar Warsame ()
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Hans Lind: Department of Real Estate and Construction Management, Royal Institute of Technology, Postal: Department of Real Estate and Construction Management , Royal Institute of Technology, Brinellvägen 1, 100 44 Stockholm, Sweden
Han-Suck Song: Department of Real Estate and Construction Management, Royal Institute of Technology, Postal: Department of Real Estate and Construction Management , Royal Institute of Technology, Brinellvägen 1, 100 44 Stockholm, Sweden
Abukar Warsame: Department of Real Estate and Construction Management, Royal Institute of Technology, Postal: Department of Real Estate and Construction Management , Royal Institute of Technology, Brinellvägen 1, 100 44 Stockholm, Sweden

No 13/15, Working Paper Series from Royal Institute of Technology, Department of Real Estate and Construction Management & Banking and Finance

Abstract: It has been reported that productivity development in the construction sector has been very low compared to other sector. Measuring productivity is however not easy and it might have been underestimated due to deficiencies in the index that is used when the value added in current prices is converted into value added at constant prices. A central problem when deflating nominal prices is that the deflation should only take away price changes for identical products and not price changes related to quality changes and quality improvement necessitated by new environmental conditions and legislations as well as demand for higher safety. The aim of this project is to help fill this gap by looking at the quality changes over time in road construction. A combination of comparative studies and enquiries with practitioners from public and private sectors that are involved in road construction projects were conducted. It was found that there had been both direct quality changes in the roads, primarily to improve safety on the roads and for noise protection, and indirect quality changes related to building in more difficult circumstances because of giving higher weight to other social goals, especially environmental goals. As these quality increases are not taken into account when productivity is measured it indicates that the yearly change in productivity is underestimated with around 1% per year.

Keywords: Productivity measurement; quality improvements; road construction projects (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D24 L74 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 17 pages
Date: 2013-08-29
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