Economic Vulnerability Assessment of the Construction Industry in the United States

Construction is one of the major contributors to the US economy. Due to the existing interdependencies between industries, the loss of production in one industry influences the production of other industries which are dependent on it. This makes the construction industry vulnerable to the inoperability induced by other producing sectors like manufacturing, transportation, etc. This paper presents the interdependencies between all the constituting sectors of the US economy to quantify the economic vulnerability of the construction industry. To achieve the said objective, the paper has adopted Input-output Model using Make and Use tables from the US Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA). The outcome of this paper is the comparison of the influence of different sectors' production inoperability on construction industry. This outcome can be used by the decision makers to identify the industries which have the potential to affect construction industry's production thus making it resilient to the exogenous shocks in other producing sectors.