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The Afghan construction industry faces resource shortages and heavily relies on foreign aid to fund public projects on the path to recovery and reconstruction. While the resource constraints demand cost-efficient delivery of construction projects, many Afghan public projects experience delays and cost overruns. This study aims to evaluate various attributes and factors influencing cost performance in public construction projects in Afghanistan.

The literature review and Delphi method identified 30 cost performance attributes relevant to the context of Afghanistan. Next, a questionnaire survey was conducted with construction management professionals working in the public sector in the Afghan construction industry to evaluate these attributes.

This study found that the lack of resources, poor project management skills and corruption in procurement are the leading causes behind cost overruns in Afghan public projects. This study also identified five latent factors influencing cost performance in public projects in Afghanistan: competency of the project team, socioeconomic and political support, governance and public procurement, planning and risk management and project characteristics.

The exploratory factor analysis did not reveal the relative significance of different cost performance success factors. Moreover, the ranking of cost performance attributes is based on the responses from the public sector construction professionals only.

The construction industry in Afghanistan significantly contributes to the country’s social and economic growth and employment. This study’s findings will help researchers, project sponsors, government departments and industry practitioners interested in improving the cost performance in Afghan public projects.

Given the scarcity of research in war-affected and conflict-sensitive regions, this study fills a research gap on project cost performance by providing insights into the cost performance success factors in public projects in Afghanistan.

Hemisphericity in behaviour studies is the role and dominance of right bran/left brain in the human brain, each side of which has varying roles and characteristics, thereby leading to different thinking orientations in the human. A study was conducted to measure the hemisphericity orientation of construction and design engineers in a large public construction organization. We know from literature that people of different hemisphericity orientations have unlike personalities and dissimilar perspectives of specific situations. The essential characteristics of hemisphericity as established in literature are presented and used in analysing the organization. From this study of engineers, it was seen that construction engineers in the organization, State Department of Engineering Construction (SDEC), are predominantly left‐brained while design engineers are predominantly right‐brained. This difference in orientation partially explains why the design and construction engineers at SDEC are unable to see eye‐to‐eye in issues concerning implementation of drawings. Left hemisphere dominant engineers are also seen to desire more organizational changes than their right hemisphere dominant counterparts. Ideally, researchers believe that a 50–50 distribution of hemisphericities in large organizations is desirable. Details, analysis, and recommendations are presented in the paper.

The purpose of this paper is to emphasize that engineering and construction are much more than possessing technical skills and that political leadership necessitates engineering, manufacturing, and construction skills.

The paper argues that the built environment and process of public investment decision making are proof enough that engineering must mix with politics.

It is found that engineering and construction education need to orient themselves to the humanities and social sciences, public policy, management science, and law.

The reality of leading effective governments requires that ministers, and prime ministers in particular, have a vast amount of general knowledge that encompasses engineering, manufacturing, finance, and construction.

The benefit to nations of having well‐educated, well‐rounded leaders at the helm can only be imagined as having a high social value.

Whereas others have espoused the need for leadership training, this paper adds value to the social discussion and brings out the dimension of politics being intricately connected with engineering and construction.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze conditional failure rates, and prioritize water pipelines for replacement based on their expected failure rate where pipes are grouped based on age and pipe type. Thus, predictions can be made on the expected number of breaks in future years.

The time to failure of a pipe can be characterized by the stochastic properties of the population as a whole, from which the likelihood of component failure is derived. When the corresponding failure rate is plotted against time, a bathtub‐shaped curve results. The bathtub curve assists in determining maintenance schedules depending on the age of the pipe. Failure rates help determine whether the rates are more than an acceptable best practice threshold to signal replacement.

Ductile iron pipes had the highest failure rates, followed by asbestos cement pipes; PVC and concrete cylinder pipes had the lowest failure rates, but because concrete cylinder pipes are very time‐consuming to repair and very expensive to install, only PVC pipes are recommended on the basis of this study. Cast iron pipes fit the bathtub shape; ductile iron and asbestos concrete were somewhat bathtub shaped, though the early phase period was not apparent; the bathtub curve for concrete cylinder was fully inverted; while PVC pipes showed zero probability of failure during the middle period. The shapes of bathtub curves drawn on conditional failure rates were similar to those for the failure rates. The bathtub curves indicate that the general failure performance of pipe materials is somewhat contrary to general principles in manufacturing.

Analysis of failure serves a practical purpose for water utilities to allocate funds for pipe maintenance and prepare a schedule for pipe replacement, so as to provide the best quality services and safe drinking water to users of the utility.

The proper prioritization of water supply pipes for repair and replacement is of great social importance to the public at large, which expends considerable funds to maintain their drinking water supply.

The study of bathtub curves has not been seen before in the analysis of water supply pipes. A unique discovery is that the traditional shape of the bathtub curve is not always applicable for water supply pipes.

The purpose of this paper is to present a multi‐year assistance plan aimed at promoting a disaster resilient and foreign‐aid‐independent community in rural Peru in the wake of the August 2007 Peru earthquake.

A collaborative effort among students and professionals from several fields including engineering, public health, business, planning, economics, and marketing is proposed to provide a holistic approach to mitigating effects of future disasters on a rural developing community.

This paper assesses community vulnerabilities exposed by the August 2007 Peru earthquake and provides conceptual solutions to mitigating effects of future disasters.

Because this is a student‐driven, volunteer‐based initiative, implementation of the discussed plan is sporadic in nature. As student leadership changes, solutions and implementation time frames discussed in this paper may be altered significantly.

The student‐professional collaborative plan for enhancing disaster‐resilience discussed in this paper may be beneficial to educators who seek to extend the educational experience beyond the classroom. The holistic model of enhancing disaster‐resilience discussed in this paper may help relief organizations to better understand the issues facing small post‐disaster communities and subsequently help to develop more efficient recovery plans.

This project will have a great impact on improving the social and family life of the inhabitants of La Garita; the improvements in water supply will reduce health problems throughout the community.

This paper discusses a unique student‐professional collaborative approach to incorporating disaster‐resilience in the built environment. An educational component is incorporated into the framework of assistance in the interest of developing knowledgeable students and community members to provide a catalyst for future development projects in neighboring communities.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate performance times from a quality engineering perspective for response and repair of pipes at a public utility. The objective is to scientifically determine the pipe that offers the most desirable downtime (DT) and time to repair (TTR).

Four types of water supply pipes – concrete cylinder (CC), cast iron (CI), ductile iron (DI), and polyvinyl chloride (PVC) – in prevalent use at the City and County of Honolulu Board of Water Supply were analyzed to determine the pipe type that is most consistently repaired to desired performance specifications. Data for mean downtime (MDT) and mean time to repair (MTTR) were used to evaluate the stability and capability of the repair processes for each pipe type. The analysis was completed through the use of control charts, operating characteristic (OC) curves, and process capability indices.

The results of the analysis indicated that CI pipes were the worst material in terms of DT and TTR. The control charts for MDT for all pipe types, and the MTTR for CI and CC pipes, were found to be out of statistical control, but the control charts for the MTTR of DI and PVC pipes were discovered to be in control. According to the OC curves, in which the hypothesis stated that the average MDT or MTTR was between the specification limits, there was a high tendency in all pipe types to accept the hypothesis when it was true. However, the probability of type I errors was high from operational standards at the USL level. Process capability analyses found that only CC pipes were able to meet performance design specifications; however, repair times are extremely large for CC pipes. Overall, it is recommended that CI pipes be replaced when the opportunity arises.

This investigation serves to address a major query in asset management at the public utility, that of which pipes should be selected during design and procurement from a maintenance perspective. In addition, the study helps to understand the trend of DT and TTR for the various pipes.

Quality water supply is of paramount social importance in modern cities.

A quality engineering approach to asset management for pipe systems at public utilities that serves to add a new dimension to asset performance analysis is adopted.

The purpose of this paper is to inform facility managers of the type of failure affecting certain pipe types more than others. This is useful in asset management as preventive maintenance can be undertaken for those pipe types that experience high probabilities of failure.

The probability of a specific pipe type failing given the cause of break, age at failure, pipe diameter, and type of soil at the location of the break was found using inventory and main break data from the Honolulu Board of Water Supply (HBWS). Bayes’ theorem was then applied to find the posterior probabilities of failure starting from the prior probabilities of failure.

It was observed that the greatest probabilities of failure involved corrosion, pipes aged between 20‐30 years, 8″ pipes, and pipes in fill material. The pipe types were ranked and scored based on their probability of failing due to break cause, age, diameter, and soil type. Cast iron pipes were shown to have the highest probability of failing. As such, attention should be given to replace segments of cast iron pipes as they reach the end of their service lives.

This study serves to address a major query in asset management at a public utility, that of which pipes should be selected for replacement when they reach the end of their service life. In addition, this study helps to understand the causes of failure for the various types of pipe.

The importance of having reliable water supply at low cost has immense social implications in modern communities. To deliver such service, water pipe assets have to be managed efficiently.

This paper addresses the probability of failure in a straightforward manner that the water utility can easily apply to its own data, both in its design and asset management.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of financial support from non-resident family members (FSNRFM) on the financial performance of newer agribusiness firms in India.

Owners of newer agribusiness firms (five years old or less) from India were surveyed regarding the perceived impact of FSNRFM on the financial performance of newer agribusiness firms.

The results show that newer agribusiness firms with FSNRFM perform better than those without FSNRFM; and build higher levels of internal financing sources relative to the newer agribusiness firms without FSNRFM, which, in turn, improves their performance.

This is a co-relational study that investigated the association between FSNRFM and financial performance of newer agribusiness firms. There is not necessarily a causal relationship between the two. The findings of this study may only be generalized to firms similar to those that were included in this research.

The study enriches the literature concerning newer agribusiness firms and the factors that improve their financial performance. The results of this study can be of great significance for owners of these firms, financial managers, farm management consultants, and other stakeholders to understand the impact of FSNRFM on financial performance of newer agribusiness firms.