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Boosting growth through home ownership
Making affordable home mortgage loans available to a large cross-section of a country's population can enhance growth and improve living standards, argue S. Nuri Erba¸s, Senior Economist in the IMF's Middle Eastern Department, and Frank E. Nothaft, Chief Economist at Freddie Mac-the second largest mortgage investor in the United States. In a recent IMF Working Paper, they look at the state of housing and mortgage markets in a handful of Middle Eastern and North African countries-Algeria, Egypt, Jordan,Morocco, and Tunisia-where home mortgage finance facilities are virtually nonexistent for lowand middle-income groups and where demand for affordable housing is high and will remain high, reflecting pent-up demand and medium- to long-term demographics. The authors emphasize that more widely available mortgage financing is a fun...
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