Home ownership and asset-based welfare

By J. Doling, R. Ronald. 2010

401 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In recent decades, the notion of an ‘asset-based’ or ‘property-based’ welfare system has become increasingly central to debates on the restructuring of western welfare states (Groves et al. 2007; Regan and Paxton 2001; Sherraden 2003; Watson 2009). The principle underlying an asset-based approach to welfare is that, rather than relying on state-managed social transfers to counter the risks of poverty, individuals accept greater responsibility for their own welfare needs by investing in financial products and property assets which augment in value over time. These can, at least in theory, later be tapped to supplement consumption and welfare needs when income is reduced, for example, in retirement, or used to acquire other forms of investment such as educational qualifications. Several socioeconomic developments have helped to advance the cause of asset-based welfare. On one side has been a combination of pressures brought on by the ageing of national populations and their expected impact on pensions and public welfare resources, along with government retrenchment of public welfare provision associated with neoliberalisation. On the other has been, until very recently at least, expanding home ownership rates and increases in housing property values across most economically advanced economies. Essentially, the potential wealth tied up in owner-occupied housing has been considered, more or less explicitly, to be a solution to the fiscal difficulties involved in the maintenance of welfare commitments, and through that, the asset in asset-based welfare has frequently become property or housing asset (Doling and Ford 2007).

Subfields: Finance, Political Science and International Relations

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/fc6f02277b42d9d4fe2ea9af3f77df1b58ed555d

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Citations in the corpus

Navigating the field of housing: housing pathways of young people in Amsterdam (2015, background): “difficult for younger households to access the owner-occupied market (Doling and Ronald 2010; McKee 2012).”
Young People, Homeownership and Future Welfare (2012, background): “It has also played a pivotal role within advanced economies in the shift from collective to asset-based welfare regimes (Doling & Ronald, 2010a , 2010b ).”
Affordable housing policy in China: New developments and new challenges (2016, background): “…the family asset can functions as social security and the building up of “asset-based security” can preserve self-sufficiency and reduce the citizens’ demand to develop onerous and costly welfare states (Doling & Ronald, 2010; Groves, Murie, & Watson, 2007; Ronald, 2007; Ronald & Doling, 2012).”
Assets and assetization in financialized capitalism (2020, background): “Homes became widely regarded in the US, UK and Australia in particular as investable assets to be leveraged through mortgage debt, traded-up, drawn-down and so on (Doling & Ronald, 2010).”
Centring Housing in Political Economy (2014, background): “The often-mentioned advantages of homeownership – including but not limited to so-called “wealth effects” (Case, Quigley, and Shiller 2005); savingin-brick for (and lower expenses during) retirement and therefore lower state expenditure on senior citizens (asset-based welfare) (Regan and Paxton 2001”
Round the Houses: Homeownership and Failures of Asset-Based Welfare in the United Kingdom (2015, background): “It is widely acknowledged that the UK housing market is highly volatile (Stephens 2011), especially compared to its European counterparts (Doling and Ronald 2010b), and oscillating prices make the timing of market entry and exit an important factor in realising gains from homeownership.”
Financialization and housing: Between globalization and Varieties of Capitalism (2016, background): “The asset side is discussed in the literature on housing asset-based welfare (Doling and Ronald, 2010; Kemeny, 2005; Toussaint and Lessing, 2009; Watson, 2009) and as collateral in the flexible neoliberal (Aalbers, 2015; Breathnach, 2010) or post-Fordist finance-led accumulation regime (Boyer,…”
The false promise of homeownership: Homeowner societies in an era of declining access and rising inequality (2020, background): “Houseprice fluctuations especially impact more precarious households, with those facing immediate economic necessities less able to wait out lower/negative return periods (Doling and Ronald, 2010; Forrest and Hirayama, 2009).”
Routledge Handbook of Cultural Gerontology (2015, background): “However, Coleman and colleagues (1999) argue that in advanced old age an increased focus on more intimate and personal dimensions of life is evident, which can be seen as a way of preserving a sense of self, through allowing the preoccupations of earlier life to recede.”
The New Chinese Model of Public Housing: A Step Forward or Backward? (2014, background): “Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong, Korea, and other East Asia economies also shared such experience in various degrees in the 1960–1970s (Doling & Ronald, 2010).”