The changing role of construction at various stages of development has been at the core of debate in the field of construction economics. It has been argued that the construction industry should follow the pattern of manufacturing, its primary supplier, rather than services, even if early studies suggested an S-shaped relationship with GDP per capita. The presented analysis stems from this well known literature and again it focuses on the link between construction share in value added and development measures. The conventional view that GDP per capita suffices is critically discussed and new variables that help the explanation of such a relationship are introduced. Discussion builds upon the comparison of standard cross country regressions in the 1970 and in 2005. Even if explicative power is quite weak it is shown that in recent years construction has been linked with new variables such as market size and population density.
