Housing Policy and Interregional Migration

Abstract

Since the housing problem has been regarded as one of the most crucial urban problems, the public sector has diligently encouraged to allocate more resources for housing both by the subsidies for housing service demands and by the financial support to private housing investment. Such housing accumulation supported by the public sector would mean the improvement of housing shortage. However, it is plausible to suggest this accumulation would motivate more labor flow, more migration, from rural o urban areas, which has been made the housing problem worse. So far, this feature of housing policy has been investigated empirically by few authors. To investigate this problem, we have formulated a multiregional econometric model based several empirical facts findings.
The purpose of this paper is to evaluate empirically the effects of alternative housing policies by simulation analyses. Four alternative cases have been simulated and these are based on different assumptions with regard to the public housing investment and to the financial support to private housing investment. In view of these results, we decided to focus specifically on regional Net Domestic Product, income per capita, per capita housing service measured by area of floor space and the spacial distribution of population. These results represent very strong evidence for the belief that there might be better housing policies than the actual one.