ABSTRACT
The central theme of Chapter 9 is the housing market. Based on the empirical results of subspace clustering, four distinct groups of countries that share a similar set of institutions and represent four models of residential capitalism have been identified in the European Union. These are the liberal-corporatist model, found among Northern European countries (Ireland, United Kingdom, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden and Finland); the statist model, which is prevalent in most core eurozone member states (France, Germany, Austria); the commodified-familial model in the south of Europe (Portugal, Spain, Greece and Estonia); and the non-commodified model, predominant in Italy and all CEE countries but Estonia. Special emphasis in the chapter has been placed on the “non-commodified” model of residential capitalism found in the CEE11 economies. The author of this chapter also embarks on an in-depth analysis of the directions, strength and most plausible causalities involved in the changes in the institutional distance between individual CEE countries and the remaining clusters co-existing in the housing market in the 2005–2014 period.
