Capital budget planning practices of building contractors in Hong Kong

This paper explores the current practice of capital budget planning and control in the Hong Kong (HK) construction industry, based on two surveys undertaken in 1994 and 1999. The aims of these surveys were to uncover the financial planning, monitoring and control procedures used by building engineering contractors in HK. The results of the current survey reveal that less than half of the respondents undertook any form of capital budget planning. The most common form of capital budget planning was a review of the minimum rate of return. Despite the low prevalence of planning, most respondents adopted some method of capital budget control, especially by way of monitoring project performance. The 1999 study was compared with a similar survey conducted in 1994. The results indicate that there was no significant improvement in capital budget planning practices over the five year period. In addition to these findings, this paper concludes with a classification of firms, according to their capital budget planning behaviour, using discriminant function analysis.