Housing Prices and General Economic Conditions: An Analysis of Chinese New Dwelling Market

This paper presents an investigation of the interaction between housing prices and general economic conditions in China for the period of 1986-2002. The empirical results indicate that housing prices in China are predictable by market fundamentals, which could explain most of the variations in housing prices. The results of Granger causality tests confirm that unemployment rate, total population, changes in construction costs, changes in the consumer price index (CPI) are all Granger causalities of housing prices, with feedback effects observed to affect the vacancy rate of new dwellings, changes in CPI, and changes in per capita disposable income of urban households. Studies with impulse response functions further illustrate these relationships in terms of the degree of the impact on housing prices from the determinants and the feedbacks. The findings indicate that there is a long-term equilibrium relationship between housing prices and market fundamentals in China and it is the identified fundamentals that drive housing prices up, rather than a bubble.