Emerging housing markets in Asia

The first paper investigates the plight of homeless poor in India. The government programs have largely focused on providing physical solution to address the problem i.e. through provisioning of shelters. Ghosh, Goel and Ojha, through a survey of homeless, find that there are aspects of good living missing in these programs, which cause dissatisfaction. Roy examines components of house prices in India using governmental surveys that capture a host of information on housing conditions in six major cities. India, like Malaysia and Indonesia, has a large young adult population. Declining homeownership is becoming a concern in developed world. Yukutake and Moriizumi examine this trend in Japan, a country where homeownership among young adults have declined from 42% in 1983 to 28% in 2013. Housing affordability also remains a major concern in Australia where issues such as the role of foreign capital in house price increases have captured the imagination of the media. Wang, Koblyakova, Tiwari and Coucher investigate if there is housing bubble in Australia and find little evidence of a bubble in the data. They conclude that the prevailing low unemployment rate, low interest rate regime, positive consumer sentiment and good performance on Australian share market, have resulted in higher demand for properties, thereby also increasing Australian house prices. In the last paper, Ge examines the impact of ethnicity on house prices using the well-established hedonic model approach on six large suburbs in Sydney (Australia). While more research exists on the impact of race on house prices, not much work has been done on the impact of ethnic conglomeration, especially in multicultural societies like Australia.