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The housing shortage in Swedish growth regions has been heatedly debated for a number of years. Extensive reform proposals have been made by market actors and academics. The former center–right government in power until 2014 emphasized reform of the urban planning process. The current “red–green” government has ongoing planning reform on its agenda, but has instead emphasized investment subsidies. In the debate, the German housing market has been put forward as a positive example. This licentiate thesis compares the early stages of housing development in Germany and Sweden to find any differences that could provide interesting points of discussion related to further housing market reform in Sweden. As the scope of such an analysis could be very wide, this thesis is restricted to urban planning law and implementation, and to city initiatives to increase housing supply, including the affordable housing segment. The first step of the research project was to identify the major problems related to Swedish planning law and its implementation and to map the current state of reform. The identified problems encompassed issues related to municipal strategies for housing construction, the urban planning process, the appeal process, areas classified as of national interest, regulations, development agreements, and municipal land allocation. The article “The Planning Process in Sweden: current debate and reform proposals” summarizes the government inquiries, bills, and reforms introduced to date and gives an outlook on possible future urban planning reform in light of recent political developments. Second, the urban planning and appeal processes in Germany and Sweden were compared. The article “Promoting Planning for Housing Development: what can Sweden learn from Germany?” discusses three alternative processes in German local planning (i.e., private initiative, facilitated procedures in built-up areas, and omission of the local plan under certain circumstances) as well as the organization of planning authorities and city demands for affordable housing. The conclusion includes a proposal for a facilitated local housing plan, the introduction of private initiative in planning, and ways to improve planning authority organization in Sweden. When it comes to planning-related city demands for affordable housing, more research drawing on extensive international experience is required. Third, city strategies for housing construction were compared in the article “City Strategies for Affordable Housing: the approaches of Berlin, Hamburg, Stockholm and Gothenburg.” Although the housing shortages in these four cities differ somewhat in structure, the tools for implementing housing policy related to construction are similar and address organization, urban planning, land allocation, and subsidies. The German cities have a more active housing policy, cooperating with developers and using tools more consistently, than do their Swedish counterparts. They are also more likely to reach their construction goals. The overall findings of the research project stress the importance of political incentives in the formation of active housing policy. QC 20151216

Few empirical studies focus on developing data and analyses on the factors that influence the decision making process of builders,developers and landlords. Interest subsidy, taxes, and competition are some of the factors that can influence the level of constructionor production costs and ultimately the price of the housing units produced.Different subsidy schemes and value-added taxes (VAT)have been used as tools to increase housing construction in Sweden. However, their effect on costs of the housing stock has notbeen rigorously examined in the current housing supply literature.The aim of this paper is to investigate the relationship betweenproduction and construction cost and its determinants especially their relationship to different subsidy schemes and value-addedtaxes. In our econometric analysis, we utilize a quarterly panel data that covers 1975–2004.Our results suggest that there is a positiverelationship between subsidies and construction cost and inverse relationship to value added taxes. This could explain why fewcompanies within the housing construction industry raise the cost of production since these companies could manage to transfersome of the tax burden from themselves to the housing developers. Paper goes on to discuss common practices of constructioncompanies that affects production costs. QC 20140219

Real estate industry is a new economic growth point and main industry in Chinese gross domestic product nowadays. This paper analyzes the trend of Chinese real estate market development to help investors to understand the current situation of Chinese real estate markets and policies better, so as to make better real estate investment decisions in China in the future. Because of oversaturated with investment and higher cost of investment there are more and more limitations in investing in big cities in China. With the rapid development of the economy, the huge inner demand of real estate is increasing in medium and small sized cities. Some investigations show that there are huge spaces of the appreciation in Chinese real estate market in medium and small sized cities. The author will describe and analyze the investment strategy and development of Fuxing Huiyu Real Estate Corporation as a case study. The demonstrated company is a public company with rapid growth in a medium sized city named Wuhan in the central part of China. Other investment companies or real estate companies could get some ideas by analyzing the development and decision making process of this company.