The Feasibility of Estimating the Demand

for Residential Mortgage Credit in Poland

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Second and most important, from the point of view of constructing a database

needed for estimation either (1) the requisite data are not available at all; (2) they are not

available at the household level; and/or (3) an adequate set of variables describing the

same household

, its housing, and its financial and socioeconomic characteristics do not

exist in the same data set. 

 It is for these types of reasons that household surveys, such

as the American Housing Survey and the Survey of Consumer Finance, were developed

in the United States.

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  Countries do not typically develop these types of micro surveys

without very specific purposes in mind; thus, there is no reason to expect that Poland

would have developed the requisite survey data.  As discussed below, however,

development and implementation of a household survey on housing and finance is our first

and most important recommendation.

Expand Microeconomic Surveys Conducted by Gminas

Finally, as also described in the annex, gminas now responsible for housing and

most aspects of housing policy and planning will be likely to feel a need for a

microeconomic household database.  Several gminas have in fact conducted local

surveys, including Szczecin, Gdynia, Sopot, and Dzierzoniow.  These surveys have been

conducted to obtain information on effective demand for housing; in addition, other data

sources, such as income tax records, have been used to corroborate income information

(Szczecin and Ostrow Wielkopolski, for example, utilized tax information).  Annex II

provides a brief review of the most complete of the gmina surveys that undertaken by

Szczecin (an effort supported by USAID).  However, no mortgage credit data were

obtained, and, in addition, the data on household income and financial characteristics were

limited, so it would be utilize these data for estimation of formal models.  We recommend

that gminas expand their survey efforts, and when doing so, to provide a more complete

data set. 

5.0

NEXT STEPS FOR POLAND

A number of recommendations are offered to assist Poland to quickly enhance its

ability to analyze the demand for housing and the demand for mortgage credit.  In the first

instance, better measures of the market value of the housing stock and annual production

must be developed.  Poland should also develop an ongoing household (microeconomic)

survey to obtain housing and financial data; variables representing the important factors

in the housing and credit decisions could then be made available, including household

income and assets, other determinants of household preferences, financial and economic

indicators, factors underlying mobility, the market price of housing, the demand for

consumer durables, demand for financial assets, and so forth.

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There are also numerous other special purpose surveys in the United States and elsewhere, dealing

with issues of health, retirement (e.g., the Retirement History Survey), education, and so forth.