Housing finance markets have been changing dramatically in both emerging and developed economies. On the one hand, housing finance markets are expanding and represent a powerful engine for economic growth in many emerging economies. However, the unfolding sub-prime mortgage crisis highlights the risks and potential turbulence that this sector can introduce into the financial system when expanding without proper infrastructure and regulation. As housing finance keeps growing in emerging economies to match a rising demand for housing, new risk management approaches, business models, funding tools, and policy instruments can help. Yet many questions remain about the right balance between innovation and regulation, the extent of risks to the financial system, the appropriate role of the state to promote affordable housing, and the effects of the sub-prime crisis. This book provides a guide for policymakers dealing with housing finance in emerging markets. It highlights the prerequisites for an effective housing finance system; it lays out several policy alternatives and models of housing finance; and it explores the role of governments in expanding access to housing finance for lower-income households. There is no "best" model set out in this book. The aim is to provide a developmental roadmap that can be tailored and sequenced to each country's situation and timing.

The growth of urban areas and population in middle and low income countries is a continuing trend. Urbanization expands as rural to urban migration offers better income opportunities in cities. This trend is both a source of development opportunities and challenges for the housing sector. On the one hand, housing is a large and growing market, and on the other, massive slums confirm the poor housing conditions in many developing countries. These adverse conditions mirror inadequate housing policies, inefficient or absent property registration, as well as limits to access to housing finance. Provision of affordable housing is therefore an important topic in the fight against poverty. This book focuses on solutions that improve the enabling environment for the poor in accessing housing finance. It explores how to develop and integrate housing finance into a sustainable financial system for developing countries and offers ways in which low-income families can obtain better access to housing finance. This book provides a conceptual framework for housing finance development and addresses practical solutions in the provision of housing finance and compares different approaches.

The recent global crisis highlighted the risks stemming from real estate booms. This has generated a growing literature trying to better understand the sources and the risks associated with housing and credit booms. This paper complements and supplements the previous work by (i) exploiting more disaggregated data on credit allowing us to dissociate between firm-credit and household (and in some cases mortgage) credit, and (ii) by taking into account the characteristics of the mortgage market, including institutional as well as other factors that vary across countries. This detailed cross-country analysis offers new valuable insights.

Emerging market stock issuance relative to GDP rose in the late twentieth century to levels that roughly matched that of advanced, industrial markets. Nonetheless, the connection between owning shares of emerging market stock and the ability to influence the management of these firms remains fundamentally different from the analogous institutional connection that has evolved in industrial markets. The reasons for the differences in emerging markets are both historical and political in nature. That is, local equity markets have had the objective of providing for some degree of local ownership and control of large economic entities since the late nineteenth century. However, local markets have operated under different global political structures since that time, ranging from imperialism, to world wars, to sovereign developmental states, to neo-liberal states. Shares issued under these different structures have been reconfigured over time, resulting in a lack of convergence along either the Anglo-American or Continental models of corporate governance. The author uses a political science paradigm to explain the growth of emerging equity markets. She departs from conventional economic explanations and examines politics at the micro-level of large issues of emerging market stock. The second half of the book presents case studies dealing with emerging market countries in Latin America, Asia, Russia and Eastern Europe, Africa and the Middle East. The case studies connect the regional, state, and firm levels to detail the multiple ownership and control arrangements, and to dispel the notion that mere quantitative growth of these markets will lead to a convergence in financial institutional structures along the lines of the industrial core of the world economy.

This open access book utilizes new data to thoroughly analyze the main factors currently shaping the African housing market. Some of these factors include the supply and demand for housing finance, land tenure security issues, construction cost conundrum, infrastructure provision, and low-cost housing alternatives. Through detailed analysis, the authors investigate the political economy surrounding the continent’s housing market and the constraints that behind-the-scenes policy makers need to address in their attempts to provide affordable housing for the majority in need. With Africa’s urban population growing rapidly, this study highlights how broad demographic shifts and rapid urbanization are placing enormous pressure on the limited infrastructure in many cities and stretching the economic and social fabric of municipalities to their breaking point. But beyond providing a snapshot of the present conditions of the African housing market, the book offers recommendations and actionable measures for policy makers and other stakeholders on how best to provide affordable housing and alleviate Africa’s housing deficit. This work will be of particular interest to practitioners, non-governmental organizations, private sector actors, students and researchers of economic policy, international development, and urban development.

Based on the work of Karl "Chip" Case, who is renowned for his scientific contributions to the economics of housing and public policy, this is a must read during a time of restructuring our nation's system of housing finance.