Effectiveness of economic incentives on clients’ participation in health and safety programmes
- Authors: Musonda, I. , Pretorius, J.H.C.
- Date: 2015-06
- Subjects: Economic incentives , Health and safety programmes , Construction industry - Safety measures , Occupational health and safety
- Type: Article
- Identifier: uj:5138 , ISSN 1021-2019 , http://hdl.handle.net/10210/14105
- Description: The use of economic incentives to improve health and safety (H&S) performance in the construction industry in general has been investigated by various scholars. However, few studies have looked at the impact of economic incentives on construction clients, especially in the developing world. This paper reports findings on the feasibility of incentives to influence construction clients to perform on H&S. The investigation was conducted using a Delphi technique to determine the impact significance of economic incentives or disincentives on construction clients’ H&S performance. A panel of experts in construction H&S was assembled from most regions of the world. A three- round iterative Delphi study aimed at establishing consensus from the expert panel was then conducted. The study found that economic factors have critical impact significance on clients’ H&S performance, and that clients were ‘very likely’ to implement various H&S elements as a result of the economic incentives and or disincentives. There is little research on the use of incentives to influence construction clients’ H&S performance and the effectiveness of such incentives. This gap in literature, and the need for improvement in construction H&S performance, motivated the current study. Therefore it was necessary to investigate specifically the extent to which economic incentives could be used to influence construction clients to become involved in H&S programmes. Economic incentives are considered to be a proactive way of improving H&S performance among other key parties, such as employees in the construction industry. The paper reports on the findings from an analysis of the impact significance of economic incentives on clients. It underscores the point that economic incentives or disincentives for construction clients are necessary to encourage them to actively participate in H&S programmes, hence resulting in performance improvement.
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Validation of international concrete creep prediction models by application to South African concretes
- Authors: Fanourakis, George C.
- Date: 2011-10
- Subjects: Concrete deformation , Creep deformation , Concrete standards
- Type: Article
- Identifier: uj:5311 , ISSN 1021-2019 , http://hdl.handle.net/10210/7734
- Description: Creep deformation of concrete is often responsible for excessive deflections at service loads which can compromise the performance of a structure. National design codes therefore provide prediction models for the estimation of creep deformation. These models are empirical-based. This paper assesses the accuracy of six international code type models, when compared with the actual strains measured on a range of South African concretes under laboratory control conditions. The models considered are those contained in AS 3600 (2001), AS 3600 (2009), Eurocode EC 2 (2004), GL (2000), GL (2004) and GZ (1993). The results indicate that for the range of concretes tested, the GL (2000) model yielded the most accurate predictions, giving the lowest overall coefficient of variation (ωall) of 31,9%. The least accurate method was the AS 3600 (2009) which yielded an overall coefficient of variation (ωall) of 74,7%. This paper also recommends a new approach to assessing the accuracy of creep models.
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