Land supply and housing prices in Hong Kong: The political economy of urban land policy

Abstract

Urban land and housing market is a political arena where the government is usually expected by the general public to intervene for the benefit of the society. With the government owning all land in Hong Kong, public land auctions have been an important channel for developers to acquire land for property development, apart from private-led urban regeneration. For a long time before 1997, the government of Hong Kong supplied land to the market via a supply-oriented model which was entirely dependent on the willingness of government to sell. The situation changed in 1997 when the administration found that they were being unresponsive, and switched to a demand-oriented supply model, the Application List System. In any case, there is a general expectation in the society that government urban land policy in supplying land should have a major bearing on the housing market, especially in making housing more affordable by the general working class. By applying a Granger causality framework, we find this expectation unrealistic as there is no evidence supporting the claim that changing land supply via government land sale programme would impact on housing prices. However, it is found that housing prices do Granger-cause land supply under the Application List System which implies that private sector is more responsive to market changes than the government, which is ironic as the government decided to abandon this model and revert back to the old supply-oriented model in 2013. We conclude that the political economy of the urban land market has made the land supply model too subjective and dependent on government agenda, which is not a health development towards a more optimal urban land policy.