Housing East Asia: socioeconomic and demographic challenges

Housing and home ownership has been strongly embedded in East Asian socioeconomic and policy models. Based on the primacy of national economic growth objectives, it was promoted as a means of, on the one hand, contributing directly to economic growth through the motor of the construction industry, and, on the other, supporting a low-taxation, low-public-expenditure economy with minimal social protection measures based on the support of the family. In recent years, however, this housing pillar is facing new social, economic, political and demographic challenges, including a decline in the political authority of authoritarian states, the undermining of traditional developmental logic, fragmentation of families and household types and the growing volatility of housing markets. Most of these have been generated or exacerbated by intensified globalization and economic crises in recent years.