SRC: House price developments across and within OECD countries (2005-2019)

• In July 2020, the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, an intergovernmental economic organisation bringing together generally high-income countries) published an online tool to explore in a visual way its database on "national and regional house price indices".

• The database has data from 2005 to 2019 and covers all the OECD members: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Korea, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovak Republic, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, United Kingdom (UK), United States (USA).

• This is how the OECD described the data:

  • "Housing is key to wellbeing. Real estate typically forms the most important asset of households and their most important source of debt. Not surprisingly given their correlation with the economic cycle, house prices are also one of the most widely tracked economic indicators. However, despite their importance, including for macroeconomic policymaking, as the 2008-09 financial crisis well illustrated, there are few internationally comparable statistics to show how house price developments vary across regions and cities within countries. This is despite the common understanding that changes in house prices within countries are rarely uniform (e.g. there may be ‘ripple’ effects). Policies that target the ‘national’ therefore may miss differences across regions and in turn add to the geography of discontent. This Statistical Insights describes a new OECD database on national and regional house price indices that aims to fill this gap."

• Database: https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=RHPI

• Tool to explore and visualise the data: https://oecd-main.shinyapps.io/House_price_indices/