ABSTRACT
This book seeks to focus on a puzzlingly underserved issue of economics on the role of investment in housing. For many years, housing, and its associated activities, was either treated as an adjunct to economic and industrial policy or at best as a marginal item in the economic planning process. After several decades of debate on what housing might contribute to economic growth, it is now a widely held view that housing is not just a peripheral activity but a central force of sound economic development, much in the same way as investments in transportation, power and communication. Contrary to earlier theoretical and policy obfuscations on the nature and the relative importance of housing, we now have clear empirical evidence that demonstrates the multifaceted ways in which housing impacts on the process of economic growth. This book sets out to demonstrate these multi-dimensional aspects of housing investment highlighting the social, economic and institutional and policy factors that make the issue urgent and central in our time.
