Differences in Perceptions of the Housing Cost Burden Among European Countries

In this paper we perform a comparative analysis of financial hardship in five countries – France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the UK – through the self-reported perception of the housing cost burden. We use EU-SILC data for 2005 to 2010. Wide differences emerge between Germany, France and the UK on the one hand, and Italy and Spain on the other. Estimation of the housing cost burden by means of logit models allows us to relate the probability of a high burden to both micro and macro-economic variables. Among the former, age reveals the existence of life-cycle effects. The latter show that GDP growth and higher consumer confidence contribute to reducing the probability of a high burden, whereas high levels of unemployment and inequality contribute to its increase. At country level, we observe differences in the size of the impact of the explanatory variables on the probability of perceiving a high burden, especially for covariates such as age, homeownership status and education