Many commentators have speculated that agricultural policies have contributed to increased obesity rates in the United States, yet such claims are often made without any analysis of the complex links between real-world farm commodity support programs, prices and consumption of foods, and caloric...

Leading firms have begun to offer “user toolkits for innovation”. User toolkits are seen as a means to eliminate (costly) iterations of need-related-information between users and producers in the product development process because toolkits allow users to perform need-related aspects of...

In selected East Asian economies, the behavior of detrended macroeconomic variables was found to be similar to that observed in the postwar U.S. economy. Consumption and investment are highly procyclical while the balance of trade and the price level are counter-cyclical in most of them. Labor...

Research into Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for partnering projects in construction becomes vital because an increasing trend of client organizations has been observed to introduce a partnering approach to their building and construction works internationally during the last decade. A...

The main task of contractors' estimators is to predict the likely costs involved in executing a future project. This is an onerous job as any errors made can undermine project success and ultimately reduce the contractors' profit margins. The inherent uncertainty of most construction work,...

The role of construction in economic development is an important issue facing the construction research community, government and international development agencies. Based on empirical analyses, the complexities of the relationship between construction activity and stage of economic development...

Over the past decade, research studies on benefits, critical success factors, difficulties, process, conceptual and theoretical models of construction partnering have been ubiquitous in the construction management discipline. In fact, there is adequate evidence that an increasing number of...

Waste management in the building industry in Hong Kong has become a major environmental issue in recent years. Of particular concern is the increasing amount of construction and demolition (C&D) waste being dumped at landfill sites. Greater consideration must be given to waste generation and...

The duration of Australian construction has been modelled by a time-cost formula expressed in the form of T=KCB, where T is the actual construction time in working days, C is the final cost of contract in millions, K is a constant characteristic of building time performance, and B is a constant...