This paper is part of a series of four Urban Policy Notes that provide a critical review on emergent challenges to Bhutan's increasing urbanization and its ramifications for growth, livability and sustainability in line with the directives of the 12th Five-Year Plan (FYP) and the Vision 2020....

In March 2018, the World Bank finalized an agreement with Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics (CAPMAS) to conduct a demand survey for housing across Egypt. The survey consisted of a sample of 10,300 households across eight governorates. The inclusive housing finance program...

Government initiatives to reduce the housing deficit in Colombia go back more than a hundred years, but it was only after the creation of the Ministry of Housing as an independent agency, a decade ago, that national housing policy took on the relevance that it has today. Since then, Colombia has...

The global housing deficit in both developed and developing countries is increasing - driven by demographic and other mega-trends including urbanization and income inequality. Global pension fund assets, on the other hand, are both growing and increasingly looking for long-term, productive...

The Central African Economic and Monetary Community (CEMAC), which consists of Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Chad, the Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, and Gabon, is one of the oldest regional groupings in Africa. Urbanization and growing population will put increasing pressure on...

The housing deficit in Argentina is estimated to affect 6 million out of the 24 million households nationally. Macro-economic turmoil has contributed to this imbalance in two ways. First, the continuous inflation and currency depreciation made real estate a refuge investment protecting the...

This report summarizes the results of the analytical work on housing market finance carried out by the World Bank Group at the request of the Ministry of Finance. The purpose of the work was to inform the policy dialogue about how best to develop a sustainable housing finance market in Nigeria,...

The Ethiopia Urban Land Supply and Affordable Housing Study (EULSAH) responds to the request fromthe Government of Ethiopia (GoE), Ministry of Urban Development and Construction to carry outfollow-on technical assistance to the Ethiopia Urbanization Review (EUR) jointly published by theWorld...

In September 2017, Hurricane Irma devastated housing on the island of Sint Maarten. Between January and March of 2019, a World Bank team carried out this Rapid Housing Sector Diagnostic. The Diagnostic is based on information gathered during a one-week mission to Sint Maarten, desktop research,...