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The purpose of this paper is to perform a quantitative analysis of the literature in order to determine the main causes of delay in construction projects.

A set of 47 articles from the literature were analyzed, yielding 1,057 different causes of delay. In order to analyze and compare the main causes of delay, their degree of impact was studied statistically. Next, a mention count method was used to determine the primary causes of construction project delays and through the use of Pareto diagrams, the main causes of delays in construction projects were determined.

It was determined that the three main causes of construction project delay are problems that occur during execution, administrative problems and labor conflicts; together they account for almost 80 percent of the causes found in the literature. Moreover, it was deduced that problems during execution are based on …