Economic Freedom 5 Years in Asia

Asia: Economic freedom index, 5-year change

Increased economic freedom is strongly associated with high GDP growth, and therefore with rises in residential property prices. Changes in a countrys score on the Heritage Foundations freedom index are calculated by the Global Property Guide to produce a 5-point rating:

• Greatly Improved
• Improved
• Nuetral
• Worse
• Much Worse

Source: Calculated using figures from The Heritage Foundation and the Wall Street Journal

Statistics in Asia. Asia has surprisingly good house price statistics, though the quality varies greatly. The ex-British colonies tend to have good house price statistics Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaysia all have excellent houses price time series, the best being Hong Kong, where the data is arguably richer than in the UK, since there are official rents statistics. However in the Indian sub-continent, only India has house price statistics, and this only in a new series, not yet available on the web.

Japan publishes no house price statistics. Its ex-colonies do better: Korea has a good house price time-series, and Taiwan also has one.

Indonesia has house price statistics, and so does China (both of questionable quality). In Thailand, the Bank of Thailand publishes a time-series. In the Philippines, Colliers produces residential property data.

No house-price time-series are produced in Vietnam, Cambodia, or Laos.