Housing Policy Impacts on Poverty and Inequality in Europe
Guillaume Bérard and
Alain Trannoy
Review of Income and Wealth, 2025, vol. 71, issue 3
Abstract:
Developed countries have addressed the challenge of improving low‐income households' housing conditions through housing allowances and social housing. In this paper, we assess the effectiveness of these policies—individually and in combination—by comparing them to a counterfactual scenario without housing support. We examine 27 European countries using harmonized data from the EU‐SILC dataset. We find that (1) cash housing benefits (housing allowances) are more cost‐effective than in‐kind housing benefits (social housing), and more effective at reducing poverty than inequality. This result holds even when accounting for a partial capture of cash housing benefits by landlords, as documented in several studies. (2) Some Nordic and Western countries—especially Finland—achieve an impressive reduction in both inequality and poverty (one‐third) while spending as much as France and the UK. By contrast, France's mixed approach, combining both policies, appears to be the least cost‐effective.
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:
Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/roiw.70028
Related works:
Working Paper: Housing Policy Impacts on Poverty and Inequality in Europe (2023) 
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:revinw:v:71:y:2025:i:3:n:e70028
Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... bs.asp?ref=0034-6586
Access Statistics for this article
Review of Income and Wealth is currently edited by Conchita D'Ambrosio and Robert J. Hill
More articles in Review of Income and Wealth from International Association for Research in Income and Wealth Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().