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This paper aims to explore the impact of the joint operation of affordability policies and whether their impact is meaningful relative to the size of the affordability crisis. Its purpose is to construct the features of a comprehensive policy package linked to a measurable outcome: solving the affordability crisis in Auckland. This study investigates the scale and nature of an affordability package that responds to three research and policy questions: What should the rate of annual growth of affordable housing be to solve the affordability crisis? Consequently, how long would it take to solve it? And how much would that policy package cost?

In this paper, the authors argue that the disjoint operation of affordability policies is one of the reasons why their impacts relative to the size of the affordability crisis has been small or negligible. Furthermore, this study demonstrates that affordability is as much about raising households’ incomes as it is about lowering housing prices. This study uses a modelling-based framework to simulate some of the levers that local and central governments have to affect housing prices and affordability: direct intervention on the supply-side and subsidies. Specifically, this simulates retention-and-targeting (RT) programs and subsidies to raise deposits via shared ownership (SO) schemes.

This study finds that solving the affordability crisis would take a decade if the supply of affordable housing increases by at least 45% annually. With the introduction of RT and SO programs, it could still be solved within a decade, where the required growth rate decreases to 35%. However, for growth rates between 5% and 10%, the policy goal is met in approximately 40 years, and the SO program becomes exceedingly expensive.

Housing affordability is one of the hottest policy issues in New Zealand and the developed world. In the past decade, a number of affordability policies have been introduced with limited success due to their lack of interoperability and siloed efforts. Results in this paper should be interpreted as the boundaries of what is feasible and realistic in the realm of affordability policies. Therefore, its contribution relies on investigating the multiple effects if the financial, administrative and political barriers to RT and SO programs could be overcome. Its scope is a blueprint for the design of policies in other cities where unaffordability has become extreme.

This impact assessment provides empirical evidence from household producer surveys to test the assumptions surrounding the contribution of participatory varietal selection (PVS) activities on seed sector development. The purpose of this paper is to focus on household access and adoption of common bean varieties from seed provision services and local markets to determine if, and under what social conditions, PVS activities stimulated seed uptake and market participation.

The propensity score matching technique and simple regression analysis were used to estimate the impact and compare household performance across three farmer groups located in Hoima, Uganda.

PVS increased access to and adoption of improved varieties and supported additional intermediate development outcomes when farmer group characteristics were aligned with PVS efforts. Specifically, PVS was more likely to stimulate market purchases of newly introduced varieties in the farmer group located closest to markets. The project did not however, improve all the development objectives that were evaluated. PVS most critically, did not increase the probability that households received the specific varieties they desired.

This study found that PVS can support the key pillars of seed sector development. In addition to increasing household access to new varieties, free seed dissemination promoted market participation and stimulated local seed market development.

This study addressed the need to consider intermediate development outcomes in impact assessments of development interventions. The findings clarified the contribution of PVS in the context of broader development goals and identified farmer group dynamics associated with enhanced impacts among rural producers in Uganda.

The automobile industry is a key contributor to the GDP in most developed countries. Whilst studies have mainly focused on new car markets, this research aims to investigate how consumers' socio-demographic profile impacts on the decision to buy used or new cars across different automobile segments.

The study focuses on a major car market in Europe, France. The data were obtained from the French Institute of Statistics (INSEE), consisting of a representative sample of 1,967 French households who bought a new or used car within a year of this study. The paper is based on random utility theory and applies multinomial logit modeling.

The findings suggest that economic, individual, household characteristics impact on car segment choice, as well as the decision of whether to buy a new or a used car.

This is one of the few studies investigating the demand for new and used cars in conjunction across car segments in a European context. It provides important insights into consumer choice in a mature market.

This paper reviews the theoretical case for industrial policy (coordination) provided by theories of multiple equilibria. It is argued that for most less developed countries the case for industrial policy (government coordination) is best made with respect to agriculture. Those states that have succeeded in terms of government policy promoting economic development, began with the agricultural sector.

The purpose of this paper is to highlight the importance of home equity and the interplay between market segments for housing market developments. The intention is to show that it is not only the aggregate equity gain but also the distribution of equity gains between segments that matter for how shocks to income impact house prices.

The paper sets out a linear housing market model with three segments. Households trade up a housing ladder and link the three segments for owner-occupied housing. The up-trading is equity-induced. An expression for the house price index, which is related to the market segment prices both directly through the segment size and indirectly through a segment position on the housing ladder is derived. The author considers the price effects of shocks to income in four housing market regimes.

The heterogeneous housing market model shows how the interplay between segments impacts housing markets. When considering shocks to income, short-run deviations in the price-to-income (PTI) ratio compared to their long-run equilibrium due to equity-induced up-trading were found. The extent of PTI overshooting is related to the intensity of equity-induced up-trading between different segments. The market structure necessary to eliminate such overshooting is contingent on the distribution of equity gains between segments. Finally, the paper shows how the price effects of macroprudential interventions might be non-negligible when indirect effects are taken into account.

The linear housing market model with three market segments introduces a framework where the intensity of equity-induced up-trading in different market segments can be analyzed. This distributional aspect is, to the best of the author's knowledge, novel. The context-specific relation between housing market structure, equity-induced up-trading and short-run deviations in the PTI ratio provides a foundation for future research.

The purpose of the current paper is to analyze the simultaneous effects of oil sanctions and financial sanctions on Iran's macroeconomic variables in a small open economy in the dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) framework.

A DSGE model with the new Keynesian approach has been designed for the above mentioned purpose giving consideration to households, production, trade, oil, government and central bank sectors. All of the parameters were calibrated by using geometric means of macroeconomic variables in 2004–2017 as the steady-state values of the variables in the static model.

Amplifying the intensity of the oil sanctions reduces oil production due to decreasing investment, technology and export of oil and reduces the central bank's foreign reserves ratio to the money base that leads to an increasing exchange rate. Furthermore, oil sanctions decrease the government revenues due to a decrease in oil export and by the government imposing an expansionary fiscal policy in the form of increasing current expenditure and preserving construction expenditure to prevent deepening the recession, which causes budget deficit and then the issue of more bonds with a higher nominal interest rate. On the other hand, financial sanctions raise transaction costs and marginal costs in the trade sectors that lead to inflation and a decrease in nonoil export and various kinds of imports. Due to inflation and uncertainty, consumption of a household increases and investment expenditure of a household decreases.

To the best of the author's knowledge, few studies in the world have analyzed the economic effect of the sanctions in the framework of DSGE models. There is no study in Iran to date which investigates the effects of the sanctions in the form of a DSGE model. So, this paper is the first study in Iran and one of the few studies in the world using a DSGE model for analyzing the effects of sanctions. Imposing three kinds of oil sanctions in addition to a financial sanction is another innovation of the current paper.

This chapter proposes a definition of pro-middle class growth derived from the approach of Lasso de la Vega, Urrutia, and Diez (2010) to intermediate polarization. The authors show that a sufficient condition for growth to be pro-middle class is for the growth rate of what we define as the “intermediate median income” of the whole population to be higher than that of the weighted average of the growth rates of the rich and smaller than the weighted average growth rate of the poor, the “rich” and the “poor” being respectively those with an income higher and lower than the median income. An empirical illustration based on Israeli data for the period 1995–2018 indicates that in absolute terms growth was not pro-middle class for any income type. In contrast, growth was pro-middle class in relative terms for all market incomes (individual income from salaried work, individual wage per hour worked, household economic income, total household income and total equivalized income). But growth was not pro-middle class for net income and net equivalized income, even in relative terms. These conclusions appear to be related to the combined effect of developments in labor force participation, welfare policy changes and major modifications in income tax rates. The intermediate polarization measures indicate that in general there was no pro-middle class growth except in the case of specific market income types.