Capturing Social Cost in Construction Sector: A Review of Literature through Meta-Analysis

All economic activities are associated with a dual range of costs i.e. the private costs and the social costs. While the private costs are always accounted for directly in the bidding process and transaction of materials and labour, the social costs often remain latent in the cost estimation process due to their impacts on third parties rather than the parties involved. Construction activities by virtue of their multifacetedness and large longitudinal and spatial scales generate a high level of social costs. However, given the numerosity of stakeholders, it has been observed that the social costs have conventionally been left unaccounted for in practice. The identification and assessment of such costs are relatively newer in the fields of civil engineering and construction cost management, nevertheless, the concept of social costs has been an integral part of the study of economics for a very long time expanding over a century. The present paper is an attempt towards exploring the concept of social costs as is defined and recognized in various fields of study in the realm of the construction sector. It adopts a meta-analysis approach to capture the extent, elements, directions, dimensions and methods of study with regard to social costs associated with the construction process as have been undertaken in previous studies. The analysis shows that due to the wide diversities in the methods adopted for the computation of social costs in the available literature, it is difficult to standardise the quantification of the cost. Moreover, the study also highlights the apathy shown in the contemporary literature towards developing an understanding of the alternative materials used in the construction sector.