Recovery in the European construction sector not before 2011Selected results of the Euroconstruct summer conference 2009

In the estimation of the 19 Euroconstruct institutes, the dramatic decline in structural engineering demand will likely lead to a decrease of around 7.5% in the overall European construction volume. While residential construction may plunge some 11% in 2009, non-residential construction can expect a drop of around 8%. Unlike building construction, which has been affected particularly hard by the global economic crisis and - in many countries - by falling real estate prices, the experts expect civil engineering to grow by more than 1% this year. The tight budgetary situation in several countries will result in a significant delay in infrastructure projects, so that the support for the civil engineering industry, provided by stimulus packages, would be realised only in individual cases. No rebound is expected in European construction before 2011. This is primarily due to the fact that non-residential construction, strongly dominated by commercial construction, should again decrease markedly next year. Residential construction will also decrease slightly in 2010. Overall investment reservation is so high that even the renovation and modernisation sector, usually the most resilient, will decline this and next year as well. Civil engineering will show the best performance in the forecast period. For this construction sector an average growth of almost 2½% is forecast for 2011. A considerably worse performance for the coming years will be in residential construction (- 3 ½% p.a.) as well as in non-residential construction (ca. - 4% p.a.).