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Construction is believed to be less dynamic than other major economic sectors. This industry displays a bell shaped share in GNP, that follows the pattern of manufacturing over the long, as labor moves towards services and construction employment share is declining. This pattern has important policy implications since construction is a growth engine at lower development stages. This study addresses this issue by using Growth and Productivity Accounts that include measures of output growth, employment and skill creation, capital formation and total-factor productivity (TFP) for selected OECD countries. Input measures include various categories of capital (K), labour (L), energy (E), material (M) and service inputs (S). The methodology builds upon the well known total-factor productivity (TFP) analysis. Growth accounting allows one to assess the relative importance of labour, capital and intermediate inputs to growth, and to derive measures of total-factor productivity (TFP) growth. TFP indicates the efficiency with which inputs are being used in the production process and is an important indicator of technological change. This framework can complement standard IO analysis to assess the significant role played by the construction industry in the economic growth of any country.

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Construction in the XXI Century: Local and global challenger brings together contributions to the CIB W065/W055/W086 Joint Symposium that was held in Rome on 18-20 October 2006. It includes approximately 200 executive summaries by scholars from around the world. The book includes a CD-Rom containing the related full papers. The content of the papers reflects the research interests of three working committees that operate within CIB (International Council for Research and Innovation in Building and Construction), a network organization based in Rotterdam. The CIB working committees are the following W065 (Organization and Management of Construction), W055(Building Economics) and W086 (Building Pathology).

In 1992, Ranko Bon argued that in highly developed countries the relatively declining economic importance of the construction industry is followed by the absolute decline of its output. The shrinking volume has implications with production capacity that, at a certain point of economic maturity, tends to be added at a slower rate than in the past. By using statistical data of the Danish construction industry, this study attempts to verify Bon’s proposition. The absolute decline of housing investments partially supports such a proposition. What is more, since the peak of the mid-1970s, the addition rate to the capacity of the Danish economy has slowed down.

This paper describes the "variables of interaction" between architecture-materials-techiques and the problems inherent in building recovery. Programming the building recovery for the development of guidelines for the 21ts century construction must take into consideration the complex correlation between technologies and related building pathologies.

This is the age of the"global knowledge", of the "local inadequacies", of the specialist enterprises and of the management difficulties. Today is necessary to create new perspectives to limit the rissk both material (structural decay / phisical obsolescence/ security needs/ static disease) and cultural and environmental (funtion degradations - inattentive environmental conditions) and to realize the right living conditions and protection for the development of guidelines for the 21st century construction. This research aims at the creation of new tools for developing a history of building technologies as they relate to their pathologies.

Using OECD input/output tables at current and constant prices, this paper analyses the performance of the construction sector of eight highly industrialized countries - Australia, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, The Netherlands, Japan and the USA - in the 1970s and 1980s. First, the main characteristics of the data set with country and time coverage are briefly introduced. Then, a set of simple indicators is used for comparative purposes, namely to assess the construction sector's diminishing role in terms of share in gross output, value added and GNP. Analysis focuses also on technologies, with emphasis on the relative role of manufacturing and services inputs. Lastly, standard measures of linkages are used to determine the main sources of induced output that are created by the push and pull effects of the construction sector on the rest of the economy.