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The transition of the baby boomer bulge into old age and their increasing longevity will lift the numbers of elderly in residential aged care. Population ageing and associated fiscal pressures have motivated governments to shift responsibility for the financing of aged care to the individual. We consider policies that include owner-occupiers' housing wealth and imputed rental incomes in means tests that determine co-contribution charges for residential aged care. Differences in how housing wealth is included in the residential aged care resource tests of three OECD countries – Australia, England and the Netherlands – are documented. We find some neglected equity implications as tenants in all three countries typically pay higher co-payments for their residential aged care than homeowners with similar wealth holdings. These outcomes are a consequence of the concessional treatment of owners' housing equity stakes, and of wider significance given the growing importance of asset-based welfare strategies. England has relatively progressive asset and income tests that offer more limited concessions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent decades, government intervention in welfare states has witnessed a shift from 'government' to 'governance': policy making shifted from hierarchical government steering to mixed forms involving government, market and civic actors. Such terminology has also entered Chinese policy language on public rental housing (PRH) provision. To unravel the perceived power distribution in the relationships between the involved actors, this article draws from in-depth interviews in two Chinese cities: Chongqing and Fuzhou. The article thereby contributes new insights to the perceived power relations in Chinese PRH provision on the ground. It also develops an analytical framework based on Billis by complementing it with Social Network Analysis to measure the power relations. Such a framework will allow the comparison of different governance systems across time and different jurisdictions within and beyond China. This study shows the structures and mechanisms for non-governmental actors to play a role, which they do not have in the 'government' period, in the governance of PRH. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2006, responsibility for implementing the Dutch housing allowance system was transferred from the Ministry of Housing to the Tax Authority. It has since been renamed, and is now known as the ‘rent rebate system’. A number of dilemmas have become evident since the 2006 changes. Attention has shifted to how to implement the system effectively: how to limit the overconsumption of housing services, how to avoid moral hazard, how to reduce outright fraud, how to reduce the poverty trap, and how to prevent the escalation of public spending. These new dilemmas have led to the central research question in this article: how to redesign a system of rent rebates? The discussion of these dilemmas points to further changes. Proposals for a redesign of the rent rebate system in the Netherlands are presented. These proposals could also be relevant for other countries. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Belgium devolved administrative and budgetary responsibility for the favourable income tax treatment of owner-occupied dwellings to its administrative regions in July 2014. This change allowed the regions to redesign their housing-related tax instruments. This paper examines a tax policy reorientation of the Flemish Region. It specifically applies the principles of the optimal tax theory based on the proposals of the British Mirrlees Review as a benchmark to determine whether owner-occupied housing is treated favourably via the Belgian tax system. A brief comparison is also carried out with four other countries (Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom) in order to test for the use of these theoretical principles in other tax systems. Since none of the countries come close to optimal taxation, and as the Mirrlees Review is also not uncontested, practice-based recommendations from relevant international organisations are also taken into consideration. Indeed, it has recently been suggested that the Belgian tax system and more specifically Flemish home ownership taxation, has moved closer to what optimal taxation could be, but that this has not come about by explicitly considering tax system mechanisms. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In recent decades, housing affordability has been increasingly linked to household financial outcomes where high housing costs relative to income are perceived to negatively affect financial well-being. However, the traditional measure of housing affordability in Australia is housing stress, which is subject to widespread criticism as an inadequate representation of overall financial stress. This methodological paper first determines the extent to which housing stress correlates with experiences of financial stress and, second, demonstrates ways in which the measure can be modified to deliver a more reliable indication of how housing costs affect financial well-being. The study contributes to the international literature by showing how the use of longitudinal data can improve the measure of housing stress providing a more accurate assessment of the relationship between housing costs and financial well-being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]