A perspective of the international construction system

Since the late 1960s, global construction activities have become more concentrated within the richer industrialised countries. Furthermore, during this same period an international construction system has emerged that is dominated by practices, contractors and material producers as well as by technologies and procedures that originated in these same countries. Consequently, the richer countries dominate somewhere between 80 and 90% of all global construction activity either directly or indirectly through their contractors, design consultants and materials producers. One explanation for their dominant role is their collective economic strengths; however, it is also a function of the technologies now used internationally to realise a complex array of differing building and civil engineering facilities. The only internationally traded category of construction resource where the poorer developing countries have a major share of the trade is in the supply of construction labour. Various strategies have been suggested to correct this imbalance in the distribution of international construction resources, many of which are essentially autarchic. Nevertheless, there are also arguments for encouraging the poorer developing countries to make use of this international construction system to facilitate their production of modern infrastructures and their creation of appropriate and efficient domestic construction capacities.