Another Role for Construction Cranes: Economic Indicator

The towering cranes that rise above development sites can be a useful financial indicator, like consumer confidence polls or housing starts, according to Rider Levett Bucknall, a construction consulting firm that uses the equipment as the basis for its RLB Crane Index.…Jagdish N. Bhagwati, a professor of economics at Columbia, said the number of gauges like these had multiplied since the 1980s, when The Economist magazine created the Big Mac Index, an informal comparison of the cost of hamburgers in different countries used to analyze exchange rates.