Construction Subcontractor Prequalification Evaluation Criteria: A Literature Review with Implications for the Sarawak Construction Industry

Subcontracting now accounts for the large majority of physical construction work delivered on projects worldwide, which makes the main contractor's ability to select capable subcontractors a primary determinant of project success. Yet the prequalification decision through which subcontractors are screened before award remains inconsistently theorised, with evaluation criteria scattered across country-specific, method-specific, and often incommensurable studies. This paper synthesises the construction subcontractor prequalification literature to consolidate a set of 29 evaluation criteria organised into seven categories, namely company, past experience, financial, quality, time, safety, and general obligations, and critically compares how these criteria have been ranked and weighted across different national and project contexts. A substantial disagreement is observed with relative importance associated with individual criteria of reputation and tender price that are ranked at or near the top in some contexts and near the bottom in others. The review argues that this variation is a reflection of differences in procurement systems, regulatory maturity, project risk profiles, and market structure instead of measurement error alone. The review found a geographical gap, which is the fact that the empirical base is dominated by studies from Peninsular Malaysia, the Middle East, and Southeast Asian neighbours. In contrast, Sarawak is a state with a fast-growing, geographically dispersed, and infrastructure-heavy construction sector that has received negligible dedicated attention despite documented subcontracting-related project failures. Building on the synthesis, the paper proposes a conceptual framework of subcontractor prequalification for the Sarawak context, explicitly presented as a literature-derived proposition requiring empirical validation rather than a tested model. The review contributes a consolidated, critically compared evidence base and a research agenda for subsequent quantitative work in Sarawak.

Social Science - Built Environment

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