• Korea Real Estate Review
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• v.24 no.1
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• pp.105-120
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• 2014

This research is to examine the impacts of the on-going global financial crisis on the housing systems of welfare states. Four developed economies in the Western Europe were selected for the analysis, and the qualitative research employed in-depth interviews with scholars in the fields of housing market and social policy in order to meet the research goal. The major findings indicate that the global economic crisis embedded into the liberalization of housing finance and the inadequacy of regulatory measures caused the vicissitude of housing markets, and its scale and magnitude could be determined by the resilience of each state's housing system. While the globalization of housing finance markets rendered easy borrowing for homeownership, intensive competition for excessive lending among financial institutions backed by heavy reliance on inter-bank and overall bank triggered market volatility, and further worsened household and public debts. It's clearly evident that a housing system with varied safety nets becomes a greater cushion to bear the risks of the financial crisis and to weather the economic storm.