Cost Overrun Issue in Construction Projects: Comprehensive Global Review

Abstract

Objective: This paper aims to consolidate the causes of cost overrun in construction projects reported across a large and fragmented body of international literature into a single taxonomy, and to synthesize the lessons that emerge from a cluster of regional, survey-based empirical studies that test these causes using comparable quantitative methods.

Research Method: The paper adopts a narrative literature review and synthesis approach, drawing on two complementary literature streams: a broad international base of construction cost- and time-overrun studies published between 1954 and 2020 across more than twenty countries, and a focused supplementary set of fourteen survey-based empirical studies conducted in Malaysia, Pakistan, and the United Arab Emirates between 2010 and 2020. In total, 101 unique sources were reviewed and their causative factors classified inductively into ten categories.

Findings: Project and site management emerged as the single most consistently dominant cause of cost overrun across independent studies, countries, and analytical methods, followed by financial management and material-price volatility as a fairly consistent second tier. The relative importance of individual causes, however, was found to shift with institutional context — communication and regulatory delay, for example, ranked far more highly in the Pakistani evidence than in the Malaysian or UAE evidence — and a meaningful share of construction-phase problems traced back to design- and planning-stage decisions.

Originality: This paper is among the first to read a cluster of methodologically comparable Malaysia-Pakistan-UAE survey studies side by side against a broader international literature base, drawing out cross-study and cross-country patterns that are not visible from any single study in isolation.