Housing ownership and housing wealth: new evidence in transitional China

Ever since housing was transformed from the most important welfare benefit to the most valuable form of private property through radical housing reform in 1998, housing allocation mechanisms in China have been characterized by the coexistence of market logic and socialist legacy. Thus, the Chinese housing system exhibits a transitional nature as the country moves away from a socialist housing system towards a privatized housing system. Using the 2011 Chinese Household Finance Survey, we not only examine these changes in private ownership of housing, but also give an updated evaluation of the privatization process with new empirical evidence. We develop a conceptual framework and an empirical analysis to shed light on distinct housing inequality patterns in transitional urban China. Our results show that both socioeconomic characteristics and socialist institutions contribute to housing inequality, but they follow different paths in the reform and have different impacts on housing inequality.