Economics

Economics studies the allocation of scarce resources: how markets form prices, how costs and benefits are weighed against each other, and how value is created and distributed.

Economic analysis underpins CRE economics (the price of space and flexibility), cost-benefit analysis of FM investments, and attempts to quantify FM value creation beyond pure cost saving. That last effort remains methodologically difficult: many claimed 'value creation' effects are correlational, not causally established.

• Is the cost-benefit analysis used complete, including hard-to-quantify benefits such as productivity?
• Is a correlation between workplace investment and productivity presented as causal evidence?

• CRE economics research and cost-benefit-analysis methodology from business economics.

• FM value claims that do not explicitly separate correlation from causation lose credibility with a critical financial audience.

• Value creation and cost-benefit analysis of FM

• Economic substantiation of facility investment decisions

• Demand organisation

  The demand organisation is typically responsible for substantiating FM value creation to the rest of the organisation.

[Content pending]

The standards section arrives in Part 7.

• Workplace investment presented as a proven productivity increase based on a single before-after case with no control group.

Quantifying FM value creation — particularly the effect of workplace and service on productivity and retention — remains an open methodological problem; controlled, causal studies are scarce.

• CoreNet Global and academic CRE-economics literature on workplace investment and productivity.