**1. Introduction**

The global economy has developed rapidly in recent years and attempts to achieve sustainable development is gaining momentum in many countries. Resource misallocation (RM) refers to the situation where resources cannot be optimally allocated between industries or companies because of the interference of existing systems or policies [1]. This suboptimal situation greatly affects a country's total factor productivity (TFP) [2]. TFP refers to the increase in output caused by progress in technology and ability other than the input of elements, such as capital and labor [3]. Some studies suggest that RM is an important reason for the huge wealth gap between countries [2]. Therefore, the allocation of resources has an extremely important impact on the success (or failure) of a country's economic development. The adverse effects of RM also make it harder to achieve sustainable development.

China is a representative example of many contemporary countries. Its current and past situation can be used as a reference to extrapolate results to other developing countries. There are serious RM problems among regions, industries, and companies in China that

**Citation:** Zhang, J.; Dong, F.; Ballesteros-Pérez, P.; Li, H.; Skitmore, M. Current and Future Trends of Resource Misallocation in the Construction Industry: A Bibliometric Review with Grounded Theory. *Buildings* **2022**, *12*, 1731. https://doi.org/10.3390/ buildings12101731

Academic Editor: Ahmed Senouci

Received: 14 September 2022 Accepted: 13 October 2022 Published: 19 October 2022

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**Copyright:** © 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).

significantly reduce its productivity [4]. These largely explain the difference in productivity between China and other more developed countries [5]. Additionally, China is facing a significant transformation of its industrial economic structure, while deepening the reform of its economic system [6]. RM is an important factor that affects TFP and an important channel to improve China's economic growth. Alleviating RM within and between regions can unlock rapid and coordinated development at both country and regional levels [7].

Previous research into RM has partially clarified the mechanism underlying the effect of resource allocation on output efficiency, improved RM's theoretical analysis, and helped understand how government policies conceive resource allocation. However, still under the COVID epidemic impact, the pressure on China's economy is relatively high. China is facing a very unbalanced state of productivity growth in the economy, reflecting a series of resource allocation problems, such as slow productivity gains in many construction market sectors, while sectors with faster productivity gains in the economy as a whole, or market employment share proportion, are becoming increasingly smaller. The market economy of China's construction industry is currently in a relatively long-term adjustment process. The process of deleveraging is far from over and the industrial structure adjustment process is equally so. With the progress of theoretical knowledge and science technology, improving the quality and construction industry market resource allocation efficiency, and solving the bottleneck of productivity are key issues. Some examples are the application of blockchain technology and digital technology resources including from BIM to extended reality (VR, AR, MR, Digital Twins, data capturing technologies, etc.) in AEC industry [8]. This could also become the key to promoting regional integration and high-quality economic development in China.

At present, the existing research has been mainly focused on effect analysis, industry policies, and organization management, but remains highly fragmented. Moreover, qualitative research into the problems and effects of RM is lacking, and there are no macroscopic analyses explaining the current situation, effects, or trends based on wide empirical evidence. Hence, a systematic literature review will help promote further and more coherent RM research in the industry.

This study provides a comprehensive review of the RM-related literature using a qualitative approach combined with grounded theory in order to provide a comprehensive and systematic literature review, and promote further and more coherent RM research in the construction industry from a global perspective. Grounded theory is convenient here as it focuses more on the systematic processing of concepts compared to traditional literature reviews. This study determines the main dimensions and hierarchical structure of the problems and effects of construction industry RM. It also explores the different interaction relationship dimensions to effectively reduce the misallocations involved. The research results will provide a stronger theoretical support for the further study of construction industry RM, as well as promote the transformation and development of industries such as those in China by improving their TFP.

#### **2. Research Methods**

This study provides a more comprehensive review of the RM-related literature using a qualitative approach combined with grounded theory. Grounded theory is convenient here as it focuses more on the systematic processing of concepts compared to traditional literature reviews.

#### *2.1. Data Collection*

In the context of this research, Resources refers to a source of supply or support, such as materials, money, or human capital owned by a country or region. They can be divided into natural and social resources. Natural resources include sunlight, air, water, land, forests, grasslands, animals, and minerals; social resources include human resources and information, together with wealth created through labor. Scarcity of resources is a basic problem in economics research, i.e., how to use limited resources to maximize social welfare

is a common concern for economists. For the construction industry, this includes life cycle model material resources [9], human resources [10], market investment resources [11], and developing new models [12].

We searched for scientific RM-related papers in the Web of Science, Science Direct, Scopus, and Emerald databases. Both Chinese and English languages were used when looking for potential matches. The main keywords for the literature search were 'resource allocation' or 'resource misallocation' + 'total factor productivity', 'upgrading of construction industry structure', and 'corporate resources'. Chinese papers from 2010 to 2020 and English papers between 2000 and 2020 were selected. Finally, we focused on core journals with high impact factors and/or recognized authors or institutions. As a result, a total of 124 papers were selected with a high relevance to RM. The most recent was published in December 2020 (the month when the literature retrieval stage was concluded). Figure 1 illustrates the literature retrieval and screening process used.

**Figure 1.** Literature retrieval and screening process.

The systematic review methodology excludes highly influential books, which is recognized as one of the method's potential limitations. However, the exclusion of books is common practice, given these sources are frequently classified as gray literature [13] due to their lack of rigorous peer-review. Many editorial outputs are also not included in scientific databases. Hence, despite some pioneering RM ideas being firstly developed in books -for example, the concept of 'industries assistance' and RM-, they have all been developed in later scientific papers. Consequently, the literature review is expected to be almost as representative as having books included.
