Wednesday 3 February 2016

The Changing Profile of Australian Construction: 1



HOW THE MINING BOOM CHANGED THE PROFILE OF THE AUSTRALIAN BUILDING AND CONSTRUCTION INDUSTRY


The way we see and understand an industry is based on the data we get from the national accounts and other collections done by the Australian Bureau of Statistics.

For the Australian construction industry the most widely seen data is the value of work done, as shown in Chart 1, with the level of activity in residential building, non-residential building and engineering construction. Our understanding of the industry is largely based on these three sectors, and the major phenomena of the last decade has of course been the increase in engineering work during mining boom 1 from 2001-2007 and mining boom 2 from 2010-2014.

Chart 1.
Source: Construction Activity: Chain Volume Measures ABS 8782.

Now the mining boom is over, there has been a lot of talk about the role of the building and construction industry in the macroeconomic transition, as the contribution to growth in gross domestic product (GDP) from mining investment now negative, other sources of growth are important. This transition is from the resource investment driven economy of a few years ago, when business investment peaked at an all-time high of 18 percent of GDP, to a more balanced, services and information economy that might give us a chance in the 21st century. The macroeconomic hope that growth in residential and non-residential building will support employment and output is currently being tested as the value of Engineering work is falling faster than Residential and Non-residential building increases.

The effect of the mining boom on the industry and the economy is an ongoing macroeconomic story. However, while a lot of attention has been given to effects on the main macro indicators of gross domestic product, employment, and inflation of construction costs, there has been less discussion about the effects on the industry. At a structural level there have been significant changes in the shares of construction industry output, employment and income between Engineering and Residential over the last decade, and these have changed the profile of the industry. This structural change is investigated in the charts below.

Beyond the regular detailed output and activity stats from the ABS there are few data sources. An infrequent construction industry survey is published (ABS 8772, last two in 2011 and 2003). However, there is also a relatively new annual publication from the ABS called Australian Industry (ABS 8055). This uses a different sample of private sector firms to get mostly financial data on a wide range of balance sheet items. The data goes back to 2006-07 and has eight main series. As explained by the ABS:

This publication presents estimates of the economic and financial performance of Australian industry in 2013-14. The estimates are produced annually using a combination of directly collected data from the annual Economic Activity Survey, conducted by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, and Business Activity Statement data provided by businesses to the Australian Taxation Office.

This is the modern approach to national statistics, accessing and organizing data from a range of sources, mostly digital. The report from a recent inquiry into the UK’s Office of National Statistics, that I reviewed here, recommended greatly increased use of digital data sources and data mining for collecting economic statistics.

Australian Industry provides a useful data set to compare industries with, and to compare sectors (called divisions) within industries. To get an idea of Construction in the wider economy, Chart 2 uses the data for the Total All Selected Industries and the Construction Industry respectively for the eight main data series produced. The effect of the building programs used in response to the financial crisis in 2007-08 are clearly shown, and were an industry windfall as profits spiked. Importantly, the funding flowed through the industry as expenses and value added both increased. Based on the ABS Construction multiplier of 2.9, where $1 million of construction work creates extra spending of $2.9 million and 37 jobs across the whole economy, that expenditure worked well as a Keynesian fiscal stimulus.

We know construction is about 8 percent of Australia’s gross domestic product percent, and that should be taken into account in the macroeconomic picture. The big question is over employment and job creation, and here the growth trend in employment in Chart 2 from 9.5 percent to nearly 11 percent, with another year of big increases in residential building following in 2015, is encouraging. However, while the mining boom seems to have lifted construction slightly, in Chart 2, it does not seem to have had a major effect on construction in relation to other industries.

Chart 2.
Source Australian Industry ABS 8155.

The eight Australian Industry series in Chart 2 are also given for three industry sectors, however instead of the three types of work in the output stats, they are Building construction, Heavy and civil engineering construction, and Construction services. These are the industry classifications used in the Australian and New Zealand Standard Industrial Classification (ANZSIC 2006), with further subdivisions of the three main sectors. (In ANZSIC Construction services is divided into four main trade groups like site preparation and finishing trades.)

This gives us a different view of the mining boom, and also the way the construction industry was affected by the mining boom, using three of the eight items shown in Chart 2. The three are: the number of people employed, total income, and industry value added. Chart 3 has the original values in dollars and people for these.

Chart 3.
Source Australian Industry ABS 8155.


Thursday 28 January 2016

A Satellite Account for the Built Environment Sector


While official statistics on the output of the construction industry capture on-site activities of contractors and subcontractors, the role of the industry linking suppliers of materials, machinery, products, services and other inputs is also important. These two views have been called broad and narrow, with the narrow industry defined as on-site work and the broad industry as the supply chain of materials, products and assemblies, and professional services. There are, however, surprisingly few studies that have quantified the relationship between the narrow and broad definitions of construction.

Based on the three studies that have quantified the relationship between the narrow and broad definitions of construction it is reasonable to conclude the wider construction industry is around twice the size of the narrow industry. Ive and Gruneberg in The Economics of the Modern Construction Sector were the first to argue a narrow definition of the construction industry includes only those firms undertaking on-site activity whereas a broad definition includes many firms from other industries involved in production of the built environment. They then went through the SIC classification to identify the other industries involved at the four digit SIC group level and found 11.2 percent of all employees are engaged in production of the built environment, compared to 4.7 percent in the construction category alone.

The 2003 UK report by David Pearce on The Social and Economic Value of Construction used their methodology and found, in the five industry groups included in the broad definition, contractors accounted for around half the total of employment, the number of firms, their turnover and value added. An Australian study in 1999, Mapping the Building and Construction Product System in Australia by the Australian Expert Group on Industry Studies, found the narrow industry is 51 percent of income and 48 percent of employment in the broad industry.

While it would be preferable to have regular, detailed data on the size and scope of the wider construction industry/sector/system, at present that is not available. Therefore a general rule of thumb is an alternative approach. Based on the studies above it would be reasonable to conclude the wider construction industry is around twice the size of the narrow industry. Note this is not an accurate measure of the wider industry, but a rough and ready estimate of its approximate scope and size. While this rule needs to be tested, it is likely to apply across many or most countries most of the time.

This rule of thumb is a useful yardstick for four reasons:
1. It does not have to be exact to convey the importance of the wider construction industry to the economy;
2. It is based on regular and readily available data on (the narrow definition of) construction industry output, thus avoiding the infrequent nature of the input-output data used to calculate multipliers and study industry linkages;
3.  It naturally varies over time with fluctuations in both the business cycle and the building cycle, emphasising the macroeconomic importance of the industry; and
4. It is not sensitive to local conditions, in that the share of the different industries included in the total will vary across countries, and the output shares of residential and non-residential building and engineering construction will vary over time, but the cumulative contribution of these industries to economic activity can still be estimated.

There is a way to turn this rough estimate into a more credible measure, and that would be through the preparation of what is known as a satellite account, which reclassifies expenditures usually presented in different industry groupings into a single sector. These are used to provide more detail on sectors that are not adequately represented in the national accounts. The System of National Accounts published by the UN (2008), which provides guidelines for national statistical agencies, in Chapter 29 explains the reasons for preparation of satellite accounts gives examples of their presentation. The process is similar to that used in Pearce (2003) where SIC data across industries is aggregated, but is done at a higher level of detail using the supply and use data from the national accounts.

At this time the most widely found satellite account is for tourism (nine countries, all irregular, often jointly funded by industry and users), but they have been produced or proposed for a range of other industries such as health, the environment, R&D, information technology, infrastructure, non-profit institutions, human capital and households. 

While these are not produced annually, and are sometimes not feasible at high levels of disaggregation, these accounts allow re-use of existing data and thus maximise its usefulness. With the funding restrictions facing statistical agencies it would be important to focus on the most important contributors to the construction industry. A version of satellite accounts known as key sector accounts selects a group of products or industries that are economically important and aggregates their data, and that could be tried as another approach.

The construction industry can be depicted in a variety of ways, but emphasising how the built environment is created and managed  through the planning, project initiation, design, fabrication and construction, operation and management stages is the most representative of the built environment sector as a whole. The complexity and number of activities involved in the built environment has, to date, prevented a coherent view of the industry developing. In turn, this has made efforts to improve the performance of the industry largely ineffectual.

The term that arguably best encompasses the broad industry, and includes the extraordinarily large number and diverse range of participants involved in the creation and maintenance of the built environment, from suppliers to end users, is the built environment sector. This would also be the obvious choice of a name for a set of satellite accounts.


AEGIS, 1999. Mapping the Building and Construction Product System in Australia. Australian Expert Group on Industry Studies, Department of Industry, Science and Resources, Canberra.

Ive, G.J. and Gruneberg, S.L. 2000. The Economics of the Modern Construction Sector, London: Macmillan.

Pearce, D. 2003. The Social and Economic Value of Construction: The Construction Industry’s Contribution to Sustainable Development, nCrisp, London.