The regionalization of international contracting and its implications for models of construction spending

This paper documents an increasing regionalization of overseas contracting during the 1980s and 1990s. This involved a greater share within richer countries, particularly of intra‐European work. This evidence challenges suggestions that middle‐income countries are particularly appropriate destinations of overseas investment by developed country contractors. The paper therefore re‐evaluates the model underlying such predictions, which relates construction spending to economic development. Reconsidering its empirical basis, it argues that the association between overall levels of per capita income and levels of construction spending is too weak to be of practical utility. It stresses the possibility of different routes to economic development and that this often remained an uncertain process and one within which levels of construction output varied widely. It therefore concludes that research should be informed by a broader political economy approach.