Integrating environmental sustainability in regeneration processes: a comparative analysis between ABI's in Copenhagen and Barcelona

The China economy had experienced a rapid growth over the past three decades, and now has been transitioning from a phase of rapid growth to a stage of high-quality development. Combined with the process of urbanisation and the marketization of the housing system, this has translated into raising issues of house price and housing affordability. Government policy has functioned to reduce housing difficulties by the implementation of the Housing Provident Fund, providing lower interest rates on mortgages and helping households to achieve homeownership. The innovative approach adopted in this paper is to examine the factors affecting housing affordability and relatedly tenure choice by the inclusion of housing policy, demographic and financial market variables. This has been achieved by employing a system of two reduced form simultaneous equations and the multi-variable fractional polynomials (MFP) techniques, by the inclusion of household data and relevant macro factors as the attachments of heterogeneity factors. This paper provides empirical evidence of the cross-sectional variations in transmission of the housing provident fund and housing affordability programs across regions and different age and income groups. The novelty is the consideration of the interaction between the capital and housing markets placed in a policy context. Applying MFP techniques for continuous and discrete dependent variables, results indicate that government policy through the housing provident fund has been effective at reducing problems of housing affordability while also increasing the probability of homeownership. Differentiation by demographic and income factors is notable with policies seemingly more effective for younger age groups.