ABSTRACT
The world’s population is increasing rapidly. It has grown from 2.5 billion in 1950 to 6.5 billion in 2007, and it is expected to keep growing for several decades (Bongaarts and Sinding, 2009). This growth, coupled with expansion in global economic activity and falling trade barriers, has led to massive increases in construction demand around the world, and encouraged the construction rms to expand internationally in order to meet the demand for infrastructure projects worldwide (Javernick-Will and Scott, 2010). Moreover, it is estimated that developing countries will spend US$22 trillion on infrastructure in the next ten years. Some rms have taken up these opportunities, and have had signicantly increasing revenues. For instance, the revenues of the top 225 international contractors from projects outside their home countries increased by 18.5 percent between 2005 and 2006 (Javernick-Will and Scott, 2010). An international construction project is dened as: “one that is located outside the country where the architectural, engineering and construction rm’s headquarters is based” (Ling et al., 2008). More recent denitions are wider in their conceptualisation of an international project. One of these (Grisham, 2010: 5) denes such a project as:
. . . one that utilizes resources from or provides services in more than one country, physically or virtually. At one extreme, a project performed in a single country utilizing local people who have international backgrounds is an international project. At the other extreme, a project that utilizes resources from, and provides services in, multiple countries is also an international project.
