Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Housing policies have been the subject of long discussions in many different countries. Based on different political systems, every county will use different types of policy to stabilize its housing market. This paper uses newly obtained data on the Chinese housing market which has not been used before and with different customized time series models. The core question investigated is whether the policies announced by the Chinese government really control market prices as expected. Up to now, the literature has not been able to obtain very good data with which to measure such policy effects in China. Hence, one of the contributions of this paper is to illustrate the importance of data which demonstrates the accuracy of measurements from a housing market perspective.

This new data set can be divided into yearly data and monthly data. It was obtained from thirty-five large and medium cities and is organized as panel data. The analytical results indicate that housing policies succeeded in controlling prices, especially in large cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, etc. In addition, by using US property taxation policy as a case study into successful control of market prices through policy this paper intends to explore the possibility of implementing property taxes in China as a policy tool. This idea has been a hot topic in policy circles.