2015年经济学人 房产问题 为何怨声载道?（在线收听）

China

Housing

Why grumble?

silver lining to the housing cloud

JUST how bad is China's housing bubble? One important measure—the most important for those trying to get a foot on the property ladder—is affordability.

Many believe that Chinese housing prices have soared well beyond the reach of ordinary people. There is some truth to that.

But a closer look at the data reveals a more complex picture.

The Economist Intelligence Unit, our sister company, created a city-level index to track the relation between housing prices and incomes across China.

Two points stand out.

First, the country's biggest cities such as Beijing and Shanghai, with populations of more than 10m,

are in a class of their own in terms of unaffordability (see chart; for full results go to our website).

Homes are markedly cheaper in almost all slightly smaller cities, even though they have millions of residents.

The price of a 100-square-metre house is on average 14-fold higher than annual household incomes in mega-cities.

For cities with populations of less than 10m, the price to income ratio is eight.

It thus makes sense for China's cities to tailor their housing policies to their own needs; some must focus on building more subsidised homes,

while others need to attract new residents to occupy their many homes now standing empty.

Second, regardless of city size, housing has become more affordable over the past four years throughout China.

At the peak, in April 2010, house prices on average were nearly 12 times household incomes; that has dropped to less than nine times today.

Prices are higher than in many developing countries, but they are not wildly divergent.

The apparent improvement in affordability does not tally with the perception of many Chinese.

But the official price data used in constructing this index show that people are adjusting to high inner-city prices by buying homes that are ever farther from urban centres.

That may not be especially painful: suburbs are increasingly well-connected by roads and railways.

The bigger concern, especially in smaller cities, is that China suffers from an oversupply of housing.

So many homes have been built that prices in such cities are now declining quickly relative to incomes.

That is desirable. But a big, sudden rise in affordability could pose considerable risks to the financial system,

which is heavily exposed to loans made to the property sector. So far, at least, China has yet to experience the pain of a property-market crash.