ABSTRACT
Following the Chinese government’s announcement of its 20 billion dollars accelerated building programme upon being selected as a host for the 2008 summer Olympics, one newspaper wrote ‘the news brought jubilant celebrations among the Chinese soccer fans, this also brought smiles to the lips of consultants, contractors and suppliers across geographic boundaries’. Globalization, advances in technology and changes in the structure of the global economy are presenting new challenges to the US$3.22 trillion construction industry worldwide (Reina and Tim, 2000). Until 2002, in the last 15 years, the Asian region’s construction industry had
grown dramatically, as had its economy, productivity, and investment in research and development (R&D). The region’s construction production was valued at over US$1000 billion in the 1990s, the number of employees running into millions. The eleven countries spent $910 billion in 1997 as construction sector investment even though the combined GDP of all ten countries (as of 2002 prices) was less than three quarters of that of the United States in the same year. Japan unequivocally tops in terms of the GDP, its construction spending, as well as the level of technology in Asia. The Asian construction market is the largest overseas market for Japanese construction companies, as about 70 per cent of the sum total of overseas construction orders in fiscal 2000 came from Asia. However several Asian countries are emulating Japan in developing their economies by increasing their capacities in high technology, and by developing a skilled labour force and better social and physical infrastructure. Resources are being devoted to high technology production, processing and distribution, including improving the quality and skills of the construction labour force. The survey presented in this book represents the construction sector in ten partici-
pating countries of the AsiaConstruct group – Australia, the People’s Republic of China (China), India, Indonesia, Japan, the Republic of Korea (South Korea), Malaysia, Singapore, Sri Lanka and Vietnam, plus Hong Kong, the Special Administrative Region of China. The AsiaConstruct Conference is modelled on EuroConstruct. However, Asia is no less, if not more, diverse than Europe in a number of social-economic and political ways. Whilst Europe has its European Currency Unit, different Asian countries have different currencies, languages, cultures, legal and government systems. Even Hong Kong is so different from its motherland, China, that its capitalist way of living is guaranteed until 2047 under the ‘one country, two systems’ principle. What follows is a cross-sectional study of the Asian construction sector covering a time-series beginning in the early 1990s.
