Housing subsidies exist in almost every country in the world. Meanwhile, in most countries pursuing housing reforms, there is a growing need for integrating various interventions into comprehensive and explicitly articulated housing strategies. This is reinforced by fiscal needs to trim public spending and thus focus budgetary subsidies on better-targeted household categories. The efficiency and equity performances of particular types of housing subsidies have been studied for a long time. On the other hand, monographs of the entire housing subsidy system in a specific country, or comparisons of specific subsidy instruments across countries, are often undertaken by academics and development agencies. These studies essentially analyze how the different types of subsidies fit together, where the leakages are, and who captures the subsidies, often with the purpose of reforming the housing subsidy systems. Such studies make abundant use of public finance criteria to assess the performance of housing subsidies. Thus, it is generally possible to assess the “quality” of particular types of housing subsidies based on simple notions of public finance.

However, the criteria used differ from one study to the next. At a different level, while analysts and policy-makers usually focus on comparing housing subsidy systems across countries, no systematic framework seems to exist to easily compare packages of housing subsidy systems. The goal of this paper is to provide an organizing set of principles for evaluating the maze of subsidies affecting the housing sector. The paper thus aims at providing operational criteria allowing comparisons to be drawn between housing subsidy systems across countries, both at the individual program level as well as the aggregate level. The paper provides a tentative solution to the cross-country comparison of subsidy systems by presenting a method to aggregate the “quality diagnoses” made at the individual program level into country-level diagnoses. Ultimately, we would like to provide policy-makers with a simple tool for a qualitative assessment of housing subsidy programs, allowing for both within- and cross-country comparisons.