The private sector and public space in Dutch city centres

Private sector involvement in the design and financing of urban redevelopment projects has been relatively rare in the Netherlands. The public sector has traditionally played a central role in spatial planning and development. Since the 1980s, however, local authorities have been sharing the responsibility for urban development with the private sector. This article explores the viability of claims drawn from the literature about the effects of private sector involvement in redeveloped public space. Confronting those claims with our empirical material, we expected to find that the participation of the private sector would increase the redevelopment budget but would also lead to restrictions on public access. These two expectations are evaluated in light of the experience in four redeveloped squares in four Dutch cities: Rotterdam, Dordrecht, Enschede and ’s-Hertogenbosch. We found that actors on the public and private sides have different interpretations of what constitutes a direct financial contribution. Those from the private sector believe they have made significant contributions, while those from the public sector see themselves as the sole funders. But they agree on the issue of free access: both public and private actors deny any negative effects of private sector involvement in this respect.     

Social housing in Spain: what role does the private rented market play?

The global economic and financial crisis has hit the Spanish economy hard, creating an unstable framework for employment and growth. Since 2007, housing markets have been deeply affected by the crisis. The private rented market has exhibited two specific consequences: on the one hand, the bursting of the real estate bubble has inhibited profit gains in the homeownership sector, providing better incentives to operate in the rented market. On the other hand, huge social conflict has emerged in relation to the lack of proper shelter for certain households which can be seen in the increase in evictions and in homelessness. We want to focus on the latter: since Spain lacks a critical mass of social housing, low-income households have been attracted by the private rented sector, particularly during expansion periods, as quite often there is no available (and affordable) alternative. In periods of economic recession, the substantial pressure that rents put on the financial situation of these households might even cause them to move out of their homes. The hypothesis we will test in this paper is that private rented markets fill several aspects of the role of social housing provision in Spain reinforcing the negative effects the lack of social housing creates in the country, highly visible during recession periods.     

Becoming a landlord: strategies of property-based welfare in the private rental sector in Great Britain

Ongoing neoliberal policies have realigned the links between housing and welfare, positioning residential property investment – commonly through homeownership and exceptionally also through landlordism – at the core of households’ asset-building strategies. Nonetheless, the private rented sector (PRS) has been commonly portrayed as a tenure option for tenants rather than a welfare strategy for landlords. Drawing on qualitative interviews with landlords across Great Britain, we explore landlords’ different motivations in engaging in landlordism; and the ways in which their property-based welfare strategies are shaped by the particular intersection of individual socioeconomic and life-course circumstances, and the broader socioeconomic and financial environment. By employing a constructionist grounded approach to research, our study contributes to a more nuanced understanding of the different ways that asset-based welfare strategies operate within the PRS. We draw attention to an understudied nexus between homeownership and landlordism which we argue represents a promising route for future research.     

On the economic and budgetary effects of investments in SCUTS: the Portuguese toll-free highways

This paper provides empirical evidence on the economic and budgetary effects of the recent investments in toll-free highways in Portugal, the so-called SCUTS, in an effort to bring some clarity to the current policy debate on these highways. This debate is centered on the issue of the financial sustainability of these highways for the public sector and is derived from the fact that their financing through public–private partnerships and shadow tolls involves regular payments from the public budget to the private firms operating them. In this context, the introduction of tolls has been suggested as a mechanism to alleviate possible budgetary pressures. Our first main conclusion is that investments in SCUTS have positive economic effects in all regions of the country. Furthermore, we find that regional spillovers account for about three-quarters of the total effects of these investments. A paradigmatic case is Lisbon, a region that captures the greatest share of these effects without any investments having actually occurred in the region itself. Our second main conclusion is that investments in SCUTS do not seem to generate problems of financial sustainability for the public budget. We estimate that for all SCUTS, the equilibrium tax rate, i.e., the rate that would balance the tax revenues induced by these highways and the shadow tolls the government has to pay, is lower than the effective tax rate for the economy. As a corollary and from a policy standpoint, our results suggest that the introduction of tolls is questionable from a conceptual perspective due to the magnitude of spillovers and seems to be unnecessary from a financial perspective.     

INDICATORS OF FINANCIAL CONDITION IN PRE‐ AND POST‐MERGER LOUISVILLE

Proponents of metropolitan consolidation identify a range of benefits that may be realized through merger, including improved financial health. There is little agreement as to the actual outcomes across localities that have consolidated, even when limiting the scope to the four major urban mergers, including the merger of Louisville, Kentucky with Jefferson County in 2003, which is under consideration here. One likely reason for conflicting results is the limitation of reflexive analysis as a means of assessing financial impact. In the private sector, analysts would use financial ratio analysis to determine whether the new merged entity was financially healthier after merger. Though a political merger differs from a private sector merger, financial ratio analysis can still be used for pre‐ and post‐ analysis of merger effects on financial health. Further, when enough time has passed since merger, quasi‐experimental designs like interrupted time series can test the hypothesis that merger had no significant financial impact on the entity at all.     

Housing Policy Changes in Ghana in the 1990s

The housing sector in Ghana has undergone fundamental changes since the 1990s. Policy focus has shifted away from direct state provision and has moved strongly towards active private sector participation in housing production, financing and production of building materials. In part, this is due to the failure of public housing programmes, dwindling state resources, unimpressive performance of state-owned enterprises, and recognition that the government alone is unable to solve the housing problem. On a broader scale, the changes are rooted in liberalization ideologies that have swept through most economies in the 1980s and 1990s, which have had varying effects on people's housing need and on the national economy. The purpose of this paper is to examine these effects, to offer some interpretations, and to outline some of the lingering challenges facing the country's housing sector.     

基于 FAHP-熵值法-TOPSIS 的 PPP 项目私营投资部门的选择

PPP 项目是公共部门与私营部门达成协议共同提供公共产品或服务的项目,公共部门引入市场竞争机制吸引社会资本,PPP 项目有效地缓解了政府的资金压力,提高了项目营运效率,使得它成为各级政府青睐的对象。公共部门在招标过程中对私营部门的选择成为项目成功的决定因素之一。通过对在 PPP 项目中私营部门的建设综合能力进行评价,构建相应的评价指标体系,统计原始数据进行归一化处理,再利用熵值法和 FAHP 法分别确定指标权重,将两种方法得出的权重进行组合,利用 TOPSIS 方法对私营部门进行最终的评价,建立了基于 FAHP-熵值法-TOPSIS 相结合的多层次评价模型,并进行实例验证该模型的科学性与适用性。     

我国房地产企业产融结合效果实证研究

随着国家对民营资本进入金融业的鼓励和金融业准入的放宽,诸多优秀房地产公司相继进入金融领域。为了研究我国房地产企业产融结合的效果,以2001~2013 年房地产企业入股金融机构事件为研究对象,运用特征指标分析和Wilcoxon秩和检验法进行实证检验,发现入股金融机构后的房地产企业偿债能力有所提升,企业的融资速度加快,但盈利能力却显著下降,企业的经营绩效没有得到很好的提升;房地产企业产融结合后,企业没有实现管理协同和财务协同。所以房企在实施产融结合时需要重视如何发挥金融资本和产业资本的协同作用。     

Development Rights: Regulating Vertical Urbanism in Taiwan

ABSTRACT

This article examines the contested interaction between planning and private property by focusing on development rights: an important, yet under-studied, aspect of private ownership. Three regulatory approaches – a road-based rule, a FAR (floor area ratio)-based rule, and a TDR (transfer of development rights) mechanism – have influenced how planning in Taiwan has governed vertical development since the early twentieth century. We link them to three planning ideologies, the city pathological, the city rational, and the city neoliberal. We argue that regulation-ideology dynamics have led to greater power for the real estate sector in appropriating density rent in Taiwan.     

Housing Investment Trusts: A New Structure of Rental Housing Provision?

Recent governments in Britain have sought to attract financial institutions into private rental housing in order to increase the scale, professionalism and reputation of the sector and thereby to 'modernise' private landlordism. In 1996, in order to provide an attractive vehicle for the financial institutions to invest in the sector, the government introduced legislation permitting the establishment of housing investment trusts. These residential property companies have a reduced tax liability compared with normal property companies. However, no housing investment trusts have so far been established and none seem likely to be set up. This paper reports on qualitative interviews with financial institutions to examine why housing investment trusts have proved to be a policy failure. It is argued that the rules governing such trusts did not reflect the normal operations of a property company and that the existing structure of housing provision in the private rented sector was itself an obstacle to the modernisation of private landlordism.     

Transnational migration,remittances and the financialization of housing in Colombia

Recently, various Latin American governments have sought to render migrants as development agents by channelling remittances to specific sectors such as housing and finance. The available literature has yet to articulate how these developments are reconfiguring the political economy of housing in the region. The paper draws on empirical data collected at both ends of the Colombia–UK migration network. It argues that the Colombian Government’s efforts to incorporate migrants into the polity through a renovated housing policy aim to institutionalize migrant households’ transnational practices and their links with global circuits of capital and finance. They are underpinned by the repositioning of housing away from consumption into an investment item and driver of economic growth and the financial sector as the main medium for households’ access to public and private housing, and other basic services. These developments have taken place in the context of a broader process of financialization of the global development agenda in the last three decades.     

Population Mobility, Tenure Choice and Institutional Factors

The Hong Kong government is involved deeply in the housing market. It provides public rental blocks as well as subsidised housing for sale. Government intervention has created various institutional factors in the form of relocation restrictions and subsidies. Little research has been done in the past to address how mobility is affected by institutional factors, in terms of the unique tenure structure in Hong Kong. This research aims to bridge this gap. It is found that government policy has a significant effect on the mobility of households, in particular the public rental sector. Further, the patterns of tenure choice are significantly different for households of public and private sectors. There are signs that the government is intending to minimise its role in the housing system. The suspension of the HOS programme together with the cancellation of loan subsidies could further restrain the mobility of public sector households. Institutionally induced spatial lock-in among public sector households will be aggravated in the near future. It is recommended that the loan scheme should be reinstated to provide an alternative and incentive for the households in the public sector to relocate and return their flats to the Housing Authority. This can help relieve the financial pressure in the face of a budget deficit because loan subsidies are more cost effective than subsidies in kind.     

Housing Inheritance and the Private Rental Sector in Australia

The impact of housing inheritance on housing provision has been overlooked in previous work, which has concentrated on quantifying housing wealth and ascertaining whether or not it results in or contributes to social stratification. However, Australian research shows that while housing inheritance may only have modest effects on the wealth of beneficiaries, most of whom are middle-aged home owners themselves, there are important implications for the Australian private rental sector. Many beneficiaries let their inherited dwellings while those dwellings that are sold are often attractive to investors because of their often low capital value and central city location. In contrast to most investors in private rental housing, beneficiaries who become landlords are not always motivated by financial gain. The results suggest that housing inheritance may offer an opportune new source of private rental housing, although like the sector itself, the supply of dwellings from this source is not directly amenable to government control.     

Uneven development and the commercialisation of public utilities: A political ecology analysis of water reforms in Malaysia

Water policy reforms introduced in Peninsular Malaysia have yielded relatively positive improvements in the operational and financial performance of water utilities. This article analyses contemporary water governance in the context of the historical origins of uneven water development in Malaysia and national heterogeneity in the political economy of water provision. The investigation builds on political ecology scholarship in urban water policy and reaffirms postcolonial critiques of neoliberal inspired water reforms in developing countries. Our study analyses the impact of the ‘asset light policy’ – a policy introduced in 2008 with the aim of commercialising public water utilities and centralising water sector investment and ownership. It is found that notwithstanding evidence of improved financial health and technical efficiency in certain states, the asset light policy has accentuated uneven water development across the country. Thus despite the policy's relatively narrow focus on technical and financial matters, it is shown to have a fundamentally political outcome. This in turn explains the current ‘policy impasse’ in five of the eleven states in Peninsular Malaysia. Furthermore, the omission of environmental considerations within the policy framework is argued to undermine the overall ambition of the policy. It is recommended that water policy makers give greater consideration to the embedded social, political and economic inequalities that characterize many former European colonies.     

An econometric analysis of private sector participation in China’s urban water supply

This paper explores the impact of private sector participation on industrial performance of urban water supply by using panel data for 35 major cities in China over the period 1998 to 2008. We find that the introduction of private sector participation is significantly correlated with improvement in integrated production capacity and water coverage rate, but not correlated with the investment in fixed assets. Private sector participation has a positive impact on the integrated production capacity in the developed eastern cities and contributes to narrowing the gap of water coverage rate between the less developed central and western cities and the more developed eastern cities. We also find that the participation of foreign companies, but not domestic private companies, significantly improves water industry performance. The research sheds some light on the importance of private participation in urban water markets. However, the performance of domestic private firms in urban water supply still needs be improved.     

Infrastructure Finance: Aims,Attitudes and Approaches

There is an increasing awareness of the need to devise new methods of financing infrastructure. Two ways of decreasing reliance on public borrowing for infrastructure are by shifting public sector cost recovery from recurrent charges to capital levies and by making private interests directly responsible for providing and financing the service. Public sector pricing of infrastructure should aim to reflect long-run marginal cost; it should extend to cover external effects; and, where possible, its impact should accord with principles of social justice. The use of benefit assessment principles and developer contributions are two ways of achieving these objectives. There is undoubtedly also a role for private sector provision of some categories of infrastructure; but it is not as important as the development of a system of public sector cost recovery.     

The impact of the university upon local economy: three methods to estimate demand-side effects

The University, as an income-expenditure flow, has positive effects in local economic development. These effects can be classified into two categories: supply effects—related to human capital and research—and demand-side effects—related to expenditure and its multiplier impact on local economy. This paper focuses on the demand-side effects of the University of Alcala (Madrid, Spain) using three different methods: (a) A simplified version of the ACE Model; (b) The Ryan short cut model and (c) the input-output technique taking into account the inside of I-O, a household sector to estimate the induced effects. The main objective of this paper is to show the advantages, limitations and scopes of each method. Finally, we propose a way to distribute territorially these effects in the Community of Madrid, using eleven intra-regional areas.     

Private Renting in a Home-owning Society: Disaster,Diversity or Deviance?

The rise in private renting in home ownership societies has been variously interpreted as increasing risk and insecurity and providing more flexible housing options for an increasingly diverse resident cohort. Drawing on an original survey and in-depth interviews with private renters in two cities in a classic home ownership society (Australia), there is clear support for the “disaster” interpretation in respect of low-income households renting in outer urban areas, with financial stress and insecurity reflecting and compounding disadvantage. For many others, private renting can be interpreted as a “constructive coping” strategy in the context of urban housing market restructuring. A sizeable cohort of private renters explicitly prioritises living in a desired inner/middle city location over owning. One – albeit relatively small group – appears “deviant” from the home ownership norm in associating private renting with greater lifestyle freedom. The paper contributes an understanding that location and lifestyle are of paramount importance to many private renters rather than housing tenure per se.     

Local financialization,household debt,and the great recession

To test the relationship between local financial sector activity and household borrowing, I exploit the credit-supply shock that occurred prior to the Great Recession as a plausibly exogenous source of variation in borrowing behavior. Using a difference-in-differences approach I find that per-capita indebtedness increased by several thousand dollars—approximately 10%—more in states with a large local financial sector during the housing market boom. A similar positive relationship between financialization and indebtedness holds at the county level. These results suggest the growing influence of local financial markets as a fundamental cause of the Great Recession.     

The impact of training on labour productivity in the European utilities sector: An empirical analysis

This paper investigates the effects of firm training on productivity growth among sustainable utility companies in Europe during the Great Recession (2008–2010). The empirical analysis uses an ad-hoc dataset based on the merge between financial and sustainability reporting. Evidence indicates the existence of positive effects of both training flow and training stock on average labour productivity, showing the crucial role of firm-sponsored human capital development in the utilities sector. Results and implications offer useful insights for a faster recovery of the utilities sector after severe recessions and in presence of major techno-organizational changes through countercyclical training investments.