Analysis Of Distribution Characteristics And Influential Factors Of Urban Residents' Housing Affordability In China

Since the complete implement of housing reform in 1998,with the sustained development of market economy and urbanization,Chinese housing market has been expanding rapidly and becoming an important pillar industry in the national economy.However,housing prices have risen too fast in the capitalization process of the currency-based housing distribution in the situation of the increasingly polarized market and the unreasonable supply structure.The above problems bring huge pressure for urban residents,even causing a series of social and economic problems.In this context,building reasonable housing affordability measure indexes can help to promote and perfect the multi-level housing supply and security system in various regions of China,which also benefits to build a comprehensive understanding of space-time distribution characteristics and the influential factors of urban residents' housing affordability.In this way,the housing affordability of urban residents will be effectively improved.The previous studies have neglected the regional housing market interaction on the spatial dimension and merely focus on the development of housing market among different regions in the temporal dimensions.On the other hand,the macro indexes are usually adopted as the affordability indexes to measure potential housing affordability in different regions,which fail to analyze and explore the actual housing affordability from micro perspectives.As the basic unit of the participation in housing markets,family is an essential part in the analysis of the housing payment problem.Therefore,this thesis constructs both macro and micro measurement indexes of housing affordability based on the theoretical framework of space economics,behavioral economics and sociology.This thesis deeply analyzes and discusses the regional distribution characteristics and influential factors of urban residents' housing affordability in different levels,which include the nation,province,city and family.According to the empirical research results,corresponding policies are put forward to improve urban residents' housing affordability in China.This thesis includes six parts.The first chapter is the introduction,which introduces the background,the aim and the significance for the study,illustrating the framework of this thesis and concluding the possible innovations and defects of the study.The second chapter is the literature review.Firstly,it defines the concept of affordability and analyzes several similar concepts based on the connotation of housing affordability to clarify the subject of this thesis.Then it introduces the common measure of housing affordability and discusses the strengths and limitations of these indexes in practical use,which are built on the basis of the ratio approach and the residual income approach.After that,the thesis elaborates the influential factors on housing affordability from micro and macro perspectives.The macro factors mainly include the system,population,geographical location and economy,while the micro factors include the family size,income,savings and the factors measuring social and economic features of individual and family such as the degree of education,marriage status and age.Finally,it sorts out the theoretical basis of housing affordability,which consists of space economics and locational theory,behavioral life cycle theory,social capital theory.The third chapter analyzes the spatio-temporal evolution of the urban residents'housing affordability from three levels including state,province and city.At the national level,it constructs the macro measure index of housing affordability represented by housing price to income ratio through re-estimating the size of the country's residential building per capita.Then it describes the historical evolution trend of housing affordability from time dimension and discovers that the housing affordability of our country presents phase changes.During 2003-2005 and 2008-2009,the housing affordability went up rapidly,while slowly declining in other time periods.From 2014,the price to income ratio appeared to present slightly callback.In the basis of macro measure index,the thesis describes the spatial distribution pattern,assembling pattern and spatial differences of housing affordability from provincial and city level through using the exploratory space data analysis tools.The results show that at the provincial level,housing affordability becomes weaker from northeast and southeast coastal areas to Yangtze River delta region consisting of Shanghai,Jiangsu and Zhejiang as cores and part of south west area depending on tourism industry.At the city level,the pressure of housing affordability mainly focuses on municipalities,some of provincial capital cities and some southeast coastal cities.Housing affordability is relatively higher in middle and western regions.Local spatial autocorrelation analysis shows that the spatial spillover effect is significant among the spatial distribution of multi-level housing affordability in China.Finally,the thesis measures the spatial distribution differences of housing affordability in our country from different levels with CV coefficients and the regional level Gini coefficient.It turns out that housing affordability has obvious space scale effect in temporal and spatial variation characteristics,which also reflects that the housing affordability distribution difference at city level is larger than that at provincial level.Chapter four analyzes the macroscopic driver leading to the housing affordability distribution differences through constructing spatial panel model in macro view.Firstly,it investigates the influential factors of housing affordability from five aspects including economy,population,government behavior,financial support and housing market.The results show that the social security expenditure,financial support and economy growth manifest significant spatial spillover effect at provincial level.Based on the spatial clustering characteristic between cities,the thesis redistricts 275 cities into first-tire,second-tire,third-tire and fourth-tire cities according to the indexes of economy,population and features of housing market.The main problem of housing affordability in first-tire and second-tier cities focuses on the rapid increasing of housing price,which of third-tire and fourth-tier level cities,on the contrary,focuses on the slow income growth.As a result,the housing affordability of third-tier city residents will increase with the economy development,while the social security expenditure and economy growth level will benefit the urban residents in the fourth-tire cities.The chapter five constructs qualitative and quantitative indexes measuring housing affordability at family level in micro view.Combining the baseline data in 2010 and tracking data in 2014 from CFPS(Chinese family dynamics tracking survey),the essay analyzes the influential factors of family housing affordability from static and dynamic angles,by introducing individual and family life cycle factors,social capital and other social or economic features.Based on the static analysis of the Logit model,the strength of housing affordability and choices of buying houses are affected differently by features of individual and family characteristics.Besides the static analysis,the essay introduces the effect of cultural norms and self-discipline to construct purchase time model based on survival analysis.The dynamic analysis shows that house purchasing behavior is closely related to local house purchasing culture and individual self-control.In order to deeply explore the micro influential factor differences among different housing property rights types,the essay uses quantile model to comparatively analyze the micro influential factors of different housing purchase groups.The thesis finally divides families into three types including owner occupied housing group,rental housing group and social housing group according to building property types.The sixth chapter is the conclusion and summary of the thesis,which brings out the relevant policy advice.In order to implement more targeted policy and regulate housing market by local conditions,the thesis suggests that government should fully consider the district features of different housing market and the family features among different housing purchase groups and pay more attention of improving the housing affordability of middle-low income families.The possible innovations of this thesis can be described as the following three aspects:(1)An analytical perspective of the space economics.On basis of traditional econometric analysis,this thesis introduces the spatial dimensions of space interaction effect into macro analysis framework of housing affordability.It studies the spatio-temporal evolution of housing affordability among different areas at different levels.It also uses multiple space panel models to verify the mechanism of influencial factors on basis of the existence of the spatial spillover effect of housing affordability.(2)A multidimensional metric structure.It constructs housing affordability measure indexes in both macro and micro dimensions.Moreover,the micro dimension indexes are divided into qualitative and quantitative indexes.With the help of CFPS micro data,this thesis digs into the social and economic features of different housing affordability families and their members.(3)Introducing cultural and psychological factors into the analysis of family house purchasing behavior from dynamic angle.This thesis introduces life cycle theory and social capital theory into choice of family house purchasing time combining with cultural norm effects,self-control and social capital factor.On basis of family and individual economic and social features,it constructs dynamic analysis framework basing on sociology and behavioral economics.