The Welfare Impacts of Social Housing Programs in Latin America: A Meta-impact Analysis

Most Latin American countries have ABC (acronyms from the Spanish words of voucher, mortgage and savings) designed social housing program. Little is known of the impacts of these programs. In this paper we estimate the welfare affects of twelve of these programs. We estimate whether the programs crowd out or in pure private housing solutions, the impacts: on homeownership, the quality of the housing solution (walls and floors), overcrowding, and the access to basic services (potable water, sewerage, electricity and garbage collection), household labour supply, income, credit access, and education outcomes. We use the single difference propensity score method with a nearest neighbourhood matching technique. The estimated pooled effect sizes, using meta-analysis with random weighting, reveal no crowding out; increased ownership, improved physical quality of the house, increased access to potable water and sewerage but no increase in access to electricity and garbage collection. There are no discernable effects on education outcome of household’s children, household’s labour supply, access to credit, income and poverty status.