Housing Indicators

Fundamental Questions Posed by the Housing Indicators Program

The Housing Indicators Program seeks to answer three fundamental questions:

• 1.
  Can informative, robust, reliable, and cost-effective techniques be developed to

  • measure key aspects of housing-sector performance;
  • establish the linkages between the socioeconomic and policy environment and key housing-sector outcomes; and
  • establish the linkages between housing-sector outcomes and broad social and macroeconomic performance?
• 2.
  How should the use of key indicators of housing-sector performance be integrated into the formulation of national shelter strategies and international development assistance to the housing sector?
• 3.
  What institutional developments can be initiated to ensure that housing indicators will be used effectively in informing housing-sector policy?

Indicators and Modules

The World Bank developed an extensive series of indicators. The investigators argue that these indicators provide relevant information on housing and housing policy in any given country. They distinguish key, regulatory, and alternate indicators. Key indicators seem likely to be the most powerful indicators of housing-sector performance across countries and through time. Some alternate indicators provide a different way of measuring the same thing as a key indicator but with more readily available data.

The Housing Indicators Program deals with 25 key housing indicators, 10 regulatory indicators, and 10 socioeconomic impact indicators. They were distilled from a comprehensive list of 160 indicators developed at a Habitat workshop in Nairobi in October 1989.

The housing indicators have been grouped into six modules:

• 1.
  The Housing Affordability Module, which deals with house prices, rents, and household incomes
• 2.
  The Housing Finance Module, which deals with mortgages, credits, and interest rates
• 3.
  The Housing Quality Module, which deals with key attributes of housing quality
• 4.
  The Housing Production Module, which deals with housing production and investment
• 5.
  The Housing Subsidies Module, which deals with general subsidies and targeted subsidies
• 6.
  The Regulatory Audit Module, which deals with regulations affecting the exchange of land and housing, land registration and ownership, housing finance regulation, rent control, administrative delays, and land use and land development controls and property taxation

All the key indicators and the alternate indicators are numbers, percentages, or ratios. Several of the regulatory indicators are composite indicators, which are formulated from responses to a large number of simple yes/no questions concerning the regulatory and institutional environment of the housing sector.

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