Annual production of cement by country in billions of metric tons. Click to expand. Source: USGS 2006 report (PDF) and the USGS 2008 report (PDF).

Cement is mainly used to make concrete, and is sort of the "active ingredient" in concrete - it is combined with sand and gravel in roughly fixed proportions. So cement production can be considered a rough proxy for the total amount of construction going on in a country.

This post updates Stuart's post about this two years ago (and yes, it's still a graph that will blow you away!) with two more years of USGS cement data, 2006 and 2007. The growth in China, from 1 GT to 1.3 GT in two years is mindboggling, even India and Russia are interesting...and there's more to think about under the fold.

edited to add: As a couple of folks pointed out--I have interchanged "production" and "usage" in this post incorrectly--however, China's 2007 cement exports were only 33 million tons out of 1.3 billion tons produced. So, at least for China, production is a good proxy for demand/consumption. My apologies for the mistake.