Building a typology of housing systems to inform policies in OECD and EU member States

Abstract

[eng] This article establishes a typology of housing systems in OECD and EU countries, using principal component and cluster analysis on housing market context and housing conditions variables from the new OECD Affordable Housing Database (AHD), as well as data on household indebtedness. We identify four groups among a sample of 25 countries, subsequently extended to 32, as countries for which a more limited set of information is available are added to the baseline analysis. A group named “Northern”, as it covers mainly Northern Europe, including Germany, features extended private rental and generally high household debt. A “Western” group, which includes France and the United Kingdom, has higher homeownership rates and more social housing. “Southern-Central” and “Eastern” groups gather European countries, where outright homeownership is prevalent, but housing conditions are poorer. Both the country coverage and the set of variables considered in this article are wider than in most previous studies and findings are broadly consistent with the comparative housing literature for the countries with overlapping coverage.