Documents housing policy 17 results

"Mainstream comparative research on welfare policy outcomes has focused mainly on the role of government benefits and resulting distributions of income. From the point of view of the economic well-being of households, it is said that this narrow approach has produced results which have exaggerated the difference between continental western Europe and the New World. It has been argued that, to get fair results, comparative studies of welfare outcomes should take into account the differences in housing policies and structures of tenure. The ownership of private houses is more common in the New World nations than in Europe. Home ownership is thought to improve the economic well-being of the typical poverty-prone group, namely older people. This article tests how the cross-national picture of poverty and inequality changes when we approach the economic well-being of households on the basis of disposable incomes after housing costs instead of the traditional, purely income-based approach. The empirical analysis shows that, instead of vast differences in inequality, poverty and, in particular, old-age poverty, the real differences between Australia and Finland are only modest when housing costs are taken into account."

"Why are some policy reforms implemented while others languish? This report aims to answer this important question by looking backwards - at 20 structural reform efforts in 10 OECD countries, during the past two decades. The case studies cover a wide variety of reform attempts in three key areas: pensions, labour- and product-market regulation. Key factors in the political, economic and reform-specifi c arenas are identifi ed as helping or hindering reform, and these fi ndings are cross-checked using a relatively simple set of Spearman rank correlations. The report's two-pronged analytical approach - quantitative and qualitative - results in unique insights for policy makers designing, adopting and implementing structural policy reforms. "