The article suggests that governments improve productivity in construction in the following ways:

Governments could smooth out their spending on construction projects. This would mean that construction companies would know they have regular work and would be more willing to invest in capital equipment (in American and Europe, the public sector accounts for 20-30% of all construction spending).
Governments could make building codes across districts more similar to encourage mass production of construction components. There are currently 93,000 different building codes in America. If these were simpler, construction companies could make more mass-produced products that would be appropriate for all areas.
Require public-sector projects to use software to produce digital construction plans. The hope would be that if construction companies use them for public projects, they would have the technology and be happy to use them on smaller private projects.

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