Quality Change and Implications for Productivity Development: Housing Construction in Sweden 1990–2010

Current procedures for computing building price indices do not adequately account for changes in the quality of new residential construction. This has resulted in an upward bias when it comes to price changes, which causes published productivity changes to be too low because of overdeflation. The aim of this study is to estimate productivity figures that take quality changes into account. Knowledge about the size of quality changes is important to quantify the true level of cost increases in the residential construction sector to obtain more reliable productivity development figures. This paper shows that productivity in the residential construction sector has been underestimated since the 1990s. The findings indicate that data collection for productivity calculations should be more detailed and rigorous to measure quality changes. The paper highlights potential improvements in the calculations of productivity changes.