A Review of Housing Supply Policies

While there has been a significant body of research devoted to analysis of Irish house price movements, there has been only a handful of studies examining the supply side of the Irish market. Therefore, it appears especially opportune at this stage of Ireland's economic recovery to assess the authors' current understanding of the supply side of the housing market. In particular, the purpose of this review is to provide insight into the types of cross-country interventions aimed at stimulating housing supply and assess the implications of this for the Irish market. The rest of this paper is laid out as follows: in the next section they review cross-country estimates of housing supply elasticities, this is followed by a review of taxation and incentives, with subsequent sections addressing the role played by infrastructure, access to development finance and planning regulations. A final section offers some concluding comments.