Employment in Construction: Multicountry Estimates of Costs and Substitution Elasticities for Small Dwellings

TLDR: In this article, a detailed analysis of Kenyan residential building, Gordon Hughes stated that "housing projects cannot be considered a particularly good way of generating employment for unskilled workers unless... the requisite supply of skilled labor is assured."

Abstract: As a trustworthy progenitor ofjobs, the construction sector has been in and out of favor with economists. Some decades ago many agreed with Adam Smith that "no species of skilled labor . .. seems more easy to learn than that of masons or bricklayers."' As an extra advantage, the complementarity of such work with other inputs, except for materials, was thought to be low. Thus Arthur Lewis wrote in the 1950s that "buildings can be created by human labor with hardly any capital to speak of,'"2 and Nurkse found construction a splendid outlet for "surplus labor,"'3 the ideal entry chamber for rural-urban migrants. "On the whole," wrote W. B. Reddaway, "this is an industry which has relatively little in the way of 'supply difficulties.' "4 With experience, however, came doubts about the ease of substituting unskilled labor for other factors of production in making buildings. Summarizing World Bank experience, Albert Waterston noted unexpectedly high costs, long delays, "the use of defective or other improper materials, poor workmanship," and so forth resulting in "works or facilities which either cannot perform as expected or soon deteriorate."'' After a detailed analysis of Kenyan residential building, Gordon Hughes stated that "housing projects cannot be considered a particularly good way of generating employment for unskilled workers unless . . . the requisite supply of skilled labor is assured. This would be difficult at the present time in Kenya, and the position would seem to be the same in many other African countries."6 A group of experts convened in 1976 by the United Nations Center for Human Settlements, however, concluded that "it is generally agreed that it is relatively easy to train skilled labor through, for example, 9 to 12 month training programs at a government training center. The main difficulties