Construction Economic News

The accompanying table records the top 10 project starts in the United States for February 2023.

Clichés are often true and it is the case that a picture can be worth a thousand words.

No Longer Just About Megas ConstructConnect announced today that February 2023’s volume of construction starts, excluding residential work, was $33.0 billion, a decrease of -42.4% versus January 2023’s figure of $57.2 billion (originally reported as $57.0 billion).

The March release of ConstructConnect’s Expansion Index registered another month of impressive gains for the construction industry across both the United States and Canada. At the national level, the U.S. index result reported a sequential month of strong double-digit gains, while Canada’s reading posted a six-month high.

At +311,000, the U.S. number on net jobs creation in February, as calculated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, was okay. It was neither truly exciting nor in any way disturbing. It was down from the +504,000 performance in January, but it wasn’t the kind of figure that would signal a recession has arrived on everyone’s doorstep. And that’s what we’re all watching for, indications of slowdown in the economy that might take it into negative real (i.e., inflation-adjusted) GDP change territory. That’s not what was delivered in February’s jobs report.

Since the spring of last year, monthly total U.S. housing starts (annualized) have been on a downward trajectory. The weakness in housing starts is one of the chief arguments for speculation that a recession is just around the corner.

The accompanying table records the top 10 project starts in the United States for January 2023.

Clichés are often true and it is the case that a picture can be worth a thousand words.

Implications of Megaproject Proliferation ConstructConnect announced today that January 2023’s volume of construction starts, excluding residential work, was $57.0 billion, an increase of +13.9% compared with December’s figure of $50.0 billion (originally reported as $50.1 billion). January was another month with an extraordinary wealth of mega-sized project initiations (i.e., projects carrying estimated values of a billion dollars or more each.) More on this in a moment.

U.S. import prices increased by 0.8% year-on-year for the period ending January 31, 2023. The latest reading is the lowest since 2020, when import prices temporarily contracted due to legislation that shut down the economy, causing a short-lived decline in demand. It marks a near plateau in import prices which, as recently as March 2022, were rising in excess of 13% on an annual basis.