Productivity studies in Nordic building and construction industry

The national statistic institutions serve the society and industry with information which is mainly based on GNP and other "macro economy" figures, and thereby of limited value for operational decision-making in companies. For evaluation of performance at operative level in B&C industry, it seems necessary to have project-based information. The Nordic productivity project forms a State-of-the-Art concerning R&D activities in this respect. Evaluation of performance, by statistical productivity measurement or other techniques, should be carried out continuously. The industry and the r&d institutions in the Nordic countries can cooperate fairly efficiently and should thereby be able to reach a common method for successful execution of long term benchmarking in B&C industry. The building process (value adding chain) is described more or less similar for all the Nordic countries. Though not completely like, the five nations do structure the process, calculate the costs and measure the product fairly similarly. The understanding of productivity and theories regarding measuring also cope. All together, this should ease future, common benchmarking project retry. Regarding the results of earlier productivity studies, the main conclusion is that the (low) quality of input data causes uncertainty. It seems obvious that the efficiency fluctuates with the general "rise and fall" in local economy. But we are still in lack of knowledge about how to rank projects and how to identify factors that stimulate or pull down productivity/efficiency. The thematic attention to productivity is actualised through the impression that "some alarming things" happened to the productivity/efficiency in the middle of the 1990'ies in (almost) all the Nordic countries. If there ever will be an explanation on this is hard to say, but the observation itself should encourage all B&C industries to support further research on the field.