Publication: Living and Leaving: Housing, Mobility and Welfare in the European Union
Loading...
Published
2018-11-01
ISSN
Date
2018-11-27
Author(s)
Editor(s)
Abstract
The availability and affordability of decent housing has become an important economic and social concern in the European Union (EU), as housing price increases in metropolitan regions have often outpaced wage increases. Housing is at the heart of growing economic divides in Europe. This is because productivity growth, which comes with higher wages and better jobs, is concentrated in cities and industrial clusters. Housing is unaffordable in metropolitan centers because the construction of new homes has not kept up with demand, reducing the standard of living of low-income households, and dissuading workers from moving to the most productive regions. While policy incentives have favored homeowners since the 1970s, less attention and resources have been devoted to easing the potential barriers and market restrictions that would allow housing supply to respond to increases in demand. Across EU member states, policymakers should focus on ensuring that land use, rental and other regulations are consistent with incentives to spur residential construction. The report highlights three key recommendations for EU policymakers: earmark unused public land for housing development and speed up approval processes; invest in greenfield projects with improved transportation links from suburban areas, to ensure cities cast a wider economic net; and create public registries to improve transparency of house sale prices to help greater competition between areas.
Link to Data Set
Citation
“Karver, Jonathan; Inchauste, Gabriela; Kim, Yeon Soo; Abdel Jelil, Mohamed. 2018. Living and Leaving: Housing, Mobility and Welfare in the European Union. © World Bank. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/30898 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”
Digital Object Identifier
Associated URLs
Associated content
Other publications in this report series
Journal
Journal Volume
Journal Issue
Collections
Related items
Showing items related by metadata.
Publication Understanding Poverty Reduction in Sri Lanka(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2015-10)This paper quantifies the contributions to poverty reduction observed in Sri Lanka between 2002 and 2012/13. The methods adopted for the analysis generate entire counterfactual distributions to account for the contributions of demographics, labor, and non-labor incomes in explaining poverty reduction. The findings show that the most important contributor to poverty reduction was growth in labor income, stemming from an increase in the returns to salaried nonfarm workers and higher returns to self-employed farm workers. Although some of this increase in earnings may point to improvements in productivity, defined as higher units of output per worker, some of it may simply reflect increases in food and commodity prices, which have increased the marginal revenue product of labor. To the extent that there have been no increases in the volumes being produced, the observed changes in poverty are vulnerable to reversals if commodity prices were to decline significantly. Finally, although private transfers (domestic and foreign) helped to reduce poverty over the period, public transfers were not as effective. In particular, the reduction in the real value of transfers of the Samurdhi program during 2002 to 2012/13 slowed down poverty reduction.Publication Understanding Changes in Poverty(World Bank Group, Washington, DC, 2014-08-12)Understanding Changes in Poverty brings together different methods to decompose the contributions to poverty reduction. A simple approach quantifies the contribution of changes in demographics, employment, earnings, public transfers, and remittances to poverty reduction. A more complex approach quantifies the contributions to poverty reduction from changes in individual and household characteristics, including changes in the sectoral, occupational, and educational structure of the workforce, as well as changes in the returns to individual and household characteristics. Understanding Changes in Poverty implements these approaches and finds that labor income growth that is, growth in income per worker rather than an increase in the number of employed workers was the largest contributor to moderate poverty reduction in 21 countries experiencing substantial reductions in poverty over the past decade. Changes in demographics, public transfers, and remittances helped, but made relatively smaller contributions to poverty reduction. Further decompositions in three countries find that labor income grew mainly because of higher returns to human capital endowments, signaling increases in productivity, higher relative price of labor, or both. Understanding Changes in Poverty will be of particular relevance to development practitioners interested in better understanding distributional changes over time. The methods and tools presented in this book can also be applied to better understand changes in inequality or any other distributional change.Publication Youth Out of School and Out of Work in Latin America(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2015-09)This paper examines the phenomena of high rates of youth that are out of school and out of work in Latin America. The analysis pursues a dynamic approach by constructing a pseudo-panel from 234 household surveys for 18 countries in the region that allow tracing the life cycle trajectories of different cohorts over time. The trajectories are associated with a series of variables characterizing the household, community, and macro environment in which schooling and labor market participation decisions take place. The most important result obtained is that the persistently high rates of being out of school and out of work among males are strongly associated with greater labor force participation by women, which can be generating a “crowding out” effect against men, given slow job creation rates across the region. The analysis also explores the possibility of scarring effects, and finds that higher shares of out of school and out of work youth at ages 15–20 years are associated with lower wages for the same cohorts later in life, at ages 35–40 years, for males and females. As for employment prospects, the analysis finds scarring effects only for females, with greater out of school and out of work youth shares being related to lower proportions of women in the labor market later in the life cycle.Publication The Aftermath of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis in the Eastern Caribbean : The Impact on the St Lucia Labor Market(World Bank Group, Washington, DC, 2015-03)This brief expands the scarce literature on the impact of the global financial crisis on labor market outcomes and welfare in the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS). The brief focuses on the economy of St. Lucia, one of the OECS member states. The statistical information assembled here should help decision makers and the public in the OECS to develop policy options that can sustain job creation and thereby enhance public welfare. It also can help gauge the effectiveness of policies over time. The evidence presented in this brief shows how the recent financial crisis had significant and long-lasting negative impacts on the welfare of St. Lucians. The government of St. Lucia attempted to use fiscal policy to boost growth and enhance labor market opportunities in the island. Still, unemployed and underemployed St. Lucians together accounted for over 40 percent of the working-age employable population. They suffered a significant decline in welfare in the aftermath of the crisis. They lost not only their income but also the collateral benefits that are often associated with being fully employed in good quality jobs in the “formal” sector of the economy.Publication Republic of Uzbekistan : Living Standards Assessment Update(Washington, DC, 2007-08)The purpose of this living standards assessment is to update and expand the first living standards assessment report that documented the poverty situation in Uzbekistan in 2000/2001. Attention has been paid to ensure the comparability of the analysis of the three years of data. The data themselves are largely comparable: the sampling methods have remained the same, as have the questionnaires and the basic implementation of the survey. However, some changes have occurred, primarily due to improved field work: these have been taken into account in the present analysis. The chapter is divided into three parts. An overview of the welfare levels in Uzbekistan from 2000-01 through 2003 is presented in section one, along with a discussion about the data sources and their strengths and weaknesses for multi-year analysis, and an analysis of the relationship between economic growth and welfare. In section two the basic indicators of living standards over the time period are presented. Section three contains information on two topics of interest for short-term and medium-term welfare: labor and education.
Users also downloaded
Showing related downloaded files
Publication Bangladesh Report on the Observance of Standards and Codes(World Bank, Dhaka, Bangladesh, 2015)The Report on the Observance of Standards and Codes - Accounting and Auditing (ROSC A&A) program is part of a 12-module joint World Bank-IMF initiative to assist member countries to strengthen their financial systems by improving their capacity to comply with internationally recognized standards and codes. The ROSC A&A program focuses on the institutional framework underpinning national accounting and auditing practices, and degree of conformity with international standards and good practices. This 2014 update to the Report on the Observance of Standards and Codes – Accounting and Auditing (ROSC A&A) assesses the degree to which the policy recommendations of the 2003 ROSC A&A review have been implemented, identifies issues that have emerged since the last review, and proposes a number of policy recommendations aimed at further improving the quality of corporate financial reporting and auditing which contributes to improving country’s business climate, investors’ confidence and economic growth potential of Bangladesh. The policy recommendations should form the basis for a prioritized, stakeholder-driven Country Action Plan (CAP), aimed to assist in further enhancing financial reporting processes in accordance with international standards and good practices, taking into account Bangladesh’s country specific circumstances.Publication Digital Africa(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2023-03-13)All African countries need better and more jobs for their growing populations. "Digital Africa: Technological Transformation for Jobs" shows that broader use of productivity-enhancing, digital technologies by enterprises and households is imperative to generate such jobs, including for lower-skilled people. At the same time, it can support not only countries’ short-term objective of postpandemic economic recovery but also their vision of economic transformation with more inclusive growth. These outcomes are not automatic, however. Mobile internet availability has increased throughout the continent in recent years, but Africa’s uptake gap is the highest in the world. Areas with at least 3G mobile internet service now cover 84 percent of Africa’s population, but only 22 percent uses such services. And the average African business lags in the use of smartphones and computers as well as more sophisticated digital technologies that catalyze further productivity gains. Two issues explain the usage gap: affordability of these new technologies and willingness to use them. For the 40 percent of Africans below the extreme poverty line, mobile data plans alone would cost one-third of their incomes—in addition to the price of access devices, apps, and electricity. Data plans for small- and medium-size businesses are also more expensive than in other regions. Moreover, shortcomings in the quality of internet services—and in the supply of attractive, skills-appropriate apps that promote entrepreneurship and raise earnings—dampen people’s willingness to use them. For those countries already using these technologies, the development payoffs are significant. New empirical studies for this report add to the rapidly growing evidence that mobile internet availability directly raises enterprise productivity, increases jobs, and reduces poverty throughout Africa. To realize these and other benefits more widely, Africa’s countries must implement complementary and mutually reinforcing policies to strengthen both consumers’ ability to pay and willingness to use digital technologies. These interventions must prioritize productive use to generate large numbers of inclusive jobs in a region poised to benefit from a massive, youthful workforce—one projected to become the world’s largest by the end of this century.Publication GovTech Maturity Index, 2022 Update(Washington, DC, 2022-12)The 2021 GovTech Maturity Index (GTMI) report and underlying dataset provide opportunities to replicate the study, identify gaps in digital transformation by comparing the differences among economies and groups of economies, and track changes over time in a transparent way. The dataset will be updated every two years to reflect developments in the GovTech domain. This 2022 GTMI update report and the accompanying dataset and new data dashboard present the progress within the last two years, highlight some of the good practices, and identify existing gaps for possible improvements in countries at the technology frontier. As with the 2020 edition, economies are grouped, not ranked, to illustrate the state of GovTech focus areas globally. This overview report presents a summary of the approach, how the 2022 GTMI dataset update is different, improvements in the GTMI dataset contents and visualization tools and GTMI group calculations, and initial findings and key messages.Publication The Islamic Republic of Iran : Report on Public Financial Management, Procurement, and Expenditure Systems in Iran(Washington, DC, 2005-11)This review aims to describe, and to the extent possible, analyze public expenditure management systems in Iran, including those involved in budget formulation and execution, financial management, procurement, and oversight (but not the management of the civil service). As such, it contains elements of a Public Expenditure Review, a Country Financial Accountability Assessment, and a Country Procurement Assessment Report. The report stops short of recommending additional or different reforms or action programs, pending further collaborative work within the agreed multiyear program. This report presents a baseline of understanding, bolstered by selected analytical and comparative diagnoses, on which the Bank can begin to tailor its work with Iran in the area of public financial management. The main chapters of the report thus summarize the size, structure, and functioning of the Iranian budget system, covering public spending performance, resource allocation, and expenditure execution. The final chapter contains a framework for assessing public financial risk in Iran, which summarizes the salient risk characteristics of the Iranian system and efforts to attenuate them. This framework could provide an agenda for future discussions on follow-up work.Publication Arab Republic of Egypt - Cost of Environmental Degradation(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-10-01)Quantitative assessments of health impacts from environmental pollution are useful informationfor government and the general public. Such assessments can serve as an instrument to identify environmental priorities, mobilize support for their implementation, and, more broadly, to advance toward realizing environmental objectives. This report provides estimates of health effects of ambient air pollution (AAP) in Greater Cairo, and inadequate household drinking water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) nationwide in Egypt. Monetized estimates are provided of the social and economic cost of these health effects in Egyptian pounds and as a percentage of Egypt’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in 2016/17, using standard economic valuation techniques. The report finds that 19,200 people died prematurely and over 3 billion days were lived with illness in Egypt in 2017 as a result of ambient PM2.5 air pollution in Greater Cairo, and inadequate water, sanitation, and hygiene in all of Egypt. The estimated cost of these health effects was equivalent to 2.5 percent of Egypt’s GDP in 2016/17. The cost of ambient PM2.5 air pollution in Greater Cairo was highest, with a central estimate of LE 47 billion, equivalent to 1.35 percent of GDP. The cost of inadequate drinking water, sanitation, and hygiene nationwide was LE 39 billion, equivalent to 1.15 percent of GDP. However, water related costs are likely higher than suggested by this figure because of undetermined exposure to lead, other heavy metals, and chemicals through drinking water. On a per capita basis, the cost of ambient air pollution in Greater Cairo was LE 2.7 billion per one million people. This is nearly seven times higher than the nationwide cost per million people of inadequate water, sanitation, and hygiene. While the report finds that air quality, in terms of PM2.5 concentrations, improved in Greater Cairo over the period from 1999 to 2016, it was outpaced by population growth, resulting in an increase in annual deaths from ambient PM2.5. Annual deaths from ambient PM2.5 per 100,000 people did, however, decline by 8 percent from 79 to 73 from 1999 to 2017.