Skip to main content

Construction industry recovery continues

The latest report from Europe’s contractor association, the FIEC, shows that the recovery of the construction industry should continue, but at a slower pace. The FIEC reports a 2.4% recovery in activity in the overall EU construction industry in 2015 and forecasts an increase of 2.1% in 2016. “After reaching the bottom in 2013 activity is slowly recovering in the construction industry,” said FIEC Vice-President Jean-Louis Marchand, responsible for economic issues, as he presented FIEC’s annual statistics
June 15, 2016 Read time: 3 mins
The latest report from Europe’s contractor association, the FIEC, shows that the recovery of the construction industry should continue, but at a slower pace. The FIEC reports a 2.4% recovery in activity in the overall EU construction industry in 2015 and forecasts an increase of 2.1% in 2016.

“After reaching the bottom in 2013 activity is slowly recovering in the construction industry,” said FIEC Vice-President Jean-Louis Marchand, responsible for economic issues, as he presented FIEC’s annual statistics 2016. “In 2015 the increase in activity has finally been slightly higher than we had initially forecasted and the trend is expected to continue in 2016, but at a slower pace.” He added.

Marchand said, “Overall, EU total construction output amounted to €1,241 billion in 2015, which represents an increase of 2.4% compared to 2014”, reported Marchand. “This is positive, but we will still need time to catch up with the pre-crisis levels.”

According to FIEC’s statistics, developments in the EU show the following results overall

Behind the overall figure for the EU as a whole, disparities between Member States remain significant with Sweden seeing the strongest growth at 10% leading and Greece the weakest, at -15.1%.

The increase in activity in 2015 is mainly due to the 6.2% growth in civil engineering and 3.5% growth in housebuilding.

Rehabilitation and maintenance activity maintained relatively stable development before and throughout the crisis with a 2.6% growth in 2015. This has cushioned the construction sector. This trend is expected to continue in the near future.

Overall civil engineering activity in 2015 increased with a high growth rate of 6.2%, mainly boosted by significant infrastructure investments in the UK. The stronger the construction sector, the greater the demand for construction machines as well as materials. Clearly, a healthy civil engineering sector can help fuel jobs in manufacturing and supplying construction machines as well as sourcing materials such as concrete and asphalt, and driving forward the quarrying sector.

The level of employment in the construction industry increased slightly by 0.9% in 2015. But it should not be forgotten that over the period 2008-2014, the sector lost more than 2 million jobs. Altogether, construction provides jobs for 14.1 million people, which represents 6.4% of Europe’s total employment. This rises to 42.3 million jobs when including the indirect employment generated in related sectors.

In spite of the troubled period, the construction industry remains one of the major engines of Europe’s growth. It represents 8.5% of EU GDP and 3.2 million enterprises – the vast majority of which are SMEs.

Related Content

  • Corridor for prosperity: The 5G Road
    June 14, 2019
    The next generation of highways will be a matrix of smart, intelligent and dynamic technologies that lower maintenance costs and ensure user safety. But challenges lie ahead, as Geoff Hadwick discovered in Dubrovnik The fifth-generation road is about to provide the world’s highway authorities with a big leap forward. This “forever-open”, self-healing road will integrate innovation into infrastructure, vehicles and entire intelligent transport systems, says Adewole Adesiyun, deputy secretary general of
  • SMOPYC success
    March 1, 2012
    The organisers of the recent SMOPYC event in Spain claim that the show was highly successful, beating targets initially set.
  • Sourcing road financing for East Africa’s network expansion
    December 4, 2015
    East Africa’s ambitious road expansion programme is seeing the network expand significantly – Shem Oirere writes The East Africa countries of Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda and Rwanda have announced ambitious road sector expansion plans in the 2015/16 financial year. This is despite their national budgets being weighed down by huge deficits and persisting lack of capacity to spend resources allocated to the sector in previous years. With the huge budget deficits, the countries will have to look for alternati
  • The radically changing face of UK highways management
    May 14, 2014
    The British Government policy paper ‘Action for Roads: A network for the 21st century’ sets out radical change to the strategic way roads are funded and managed – including plans to turn the Highways Agency into a Government-owned company and a pledge to invest over €33.4 billion (£28 billion) in roads maintenance between 2015 and 2020. Jenny Moten, Highways Agency divisional director for Network Services, gave a keynote presentation on the new approach to strategic highways management during the Road Safet