Attributing a rental value to homeowners' dwellings is essential in different contexts, including poverty and inequality analysis, the compilation of national accounts, consumer price indexes, and estimation of purchasing power parity indexes.
... See More + The proposed solution is often to use homeowners' estimates of the market rent they would pay for their dwelling if they were renting it, which is usually referred to as homeowners' self-assessed rent. Lack of alternative surveys and up-to-date and complete administrative data about dwellings' market values typically bounds researchers to test the accuracy of homeowners' self-assessed rent using only information from household budget surveys. Using 13 years of the Peruvian household budget survey, this paper compares two methods to assess the accuracy of homeowners' self-assessed rent and finds that the average homeowner in Lima overestimates the market rent of her dwelling by between 8 and 15 percent. However, homeowners' self-assessment inaccuracy fades away in most years when homeowners are compared with their most observationally similar tenants.
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Policy Research Working Paper WPS8983 AUG 15, 2019
Understanding how land prices are determined is of particular importance for policy makers; however, there is little evidence in African countries, which are currently experiencing rapid urbanization.
... See More + The paper examines the relationship between land prices and locational characteristics using data from Antananarivo, the capital of Madagascar. It is found that the land value gradients are relatively steep, indicating that the land and housing prices tend to overshoot in the middle of the city, pushing the poor away from the city to suburban areas. It is also found that access to transport infrastructure and services, such as minibuses, is an important determinant of land value. Not only transport connectivity, but also other factors, such as proximity to amenities and administrative centers, are found to be important. Better land management and urban transport policies are called for to promote these aspects in the city.
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Policy Research Working Paper WPS8958 AUG 06, 2019
Housing is the largest durable good consumed by households. As such, any consumption-based measure of welfare, to be comprehensive, must include the value of the flow of services households derive from their dwellings, the so-called imputed rent.
... See More + However, estimating imputed rents is a daunting task, which researchers and practitioners tend to overlook. This paper is the first attempt to assess the distributional impact of including housing in the welfare aggregate; the paper tests two estimation methods and analyzes four developing countries. The distributional impact cannot be predicted a priori, and evidence suggests it is context and method specific. Although changes in poverty and inequality are always statistically significant, they are only occasionally larger than one percentage point. By contrast, shared prosperity exhibits sizable changes, which might also determine international re-rankings. Albeit the inclusion of imputed rents reshuffles the set of poor households, observed changes in the socioeconomic profiling of the poor are unlikely to affect pro-poor policy design.
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Policy Research Working Paper WPS8955 AUG 06, 2019
In recent years, there has been renewed interest in access to jobs in relation to transport connectivity. In Sub-Saharan Africa, about 14 million working age people are added to the labor market every year.
... See More + Ensuring sustained access to jobs seems to be a prerequisite for inclusive and robust economic growth. The paper examines the impact of public transit connectivity on access to jobs, especially focusing on wages. Using data from Antananarivo, Madagascar, it is shown that the wages earned by commuters are systematically higher than the wages earned by those who decided not to commute and are self-employed or engaged with family businesses around their neighborhood. Proximity to public transport, especially taxi-be, is important to promote people's access to jobs. It is also found that there is a substantial gender inequality in wages in the country: Women are more likely to use buses to commute, and yet, they earn less than men. In addition, the poor tend to benefit less from public transportation. Public bus services are affordable, however, the quality of the services may remain low.
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Policy Research Working Paper WPS8959 AUG 06, 2019
Housing is the largest durable good consumed by households. As such, any consumption-based measure of welfare, to be comprehensive, must include the value of the flow of services households derive from their dwellings, the so-called imputed rent.
... See More + However, estimating imputed rents is a daunting task, which researchers and practitioners tend to overlook. This paper is the first attempt to assess the distributional impact of including housing in the welfare aggregate; the paper tests two estimation methods and analyzes four developing countries. The distributional impact cannot be predicted a priori, and evidence suggests it is context and method specific. Although changes in poverty and inequality are always statistically significant, they are only occasionally larger than one percentage point. By contrast, shared prosperity exhibits sizable changes, which might also determine international re-rankings. Albeit the inclusion of imputed rents reshuffles the setof poor households, observed changes in the socioeconomic profiling of the poor are unlikely to affect pro-poor policy design.
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Working Paper (Numbered Series) 140352 AUG 06, 2019
