Economic Evaluation of Housing Subsidy Systems: A Methodology with Application to Morocco

The paper provides operational criteria that allow evaluation of systems of housing subsidies, both at the individual program level and at the aggregate (country) level. It examines the public finance assessment criteria used by different authors to analyze subsidy programs and confront them systematically. The paper considers the system prevailing in Morocco in 1995 and 2004. The analysis shows that the most visible subsidies might not have been the most inefficient, nor the most resource consuming for the state.