Free Movement and Affordable Housing : Public Preferences for Reform in Uzbekistan
Uzbekistan has one of the lowest rates of internal migration in the world, leading to persistent economic imbalances. Drawing from a unique monthly panel survey called Listening to the Citizens of Uzbekistan and a survey experiment, this paper focu...
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| Format: | Working Paper |
| Language: | English |
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World Bank, Washington, DC
2020
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| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/595891578495293475/Free-Movement-and-Affordable-Housing-Public-Preferences-for-Reform-in-Uzbekistan http://hdl.handle.net/10986/33156 |
| Summary: | Uzbekistan has one of the lowest rates
of internal migration in the world, leading to persistent
economic imbalances. Drawing from a unique monthly panel
survey called Listening to the Citizens of Uzbekistan and a
survey experiment, this paper focuses on two factors that
prevent domestic mobility: (i) restrictive propiska
registration policies, and (ii) the exceptionally high cost
of urban housing. Registration rules prohibit migration to
urban centers, and urban housing costs push up the cost of
living to as much as 550 percent of the national average,
levels severely unaffordable for almost all rural residents.
But the proposed government reforms in 2019 to address these
challenges are very popular. The results show that about 90
percent of people support lifting all registration
restrictions and over 80 percent favor increasing urban
housing construction. The results of the experiment show
that reform popularity increases when propiska rules and
housing costs are referenced in randomly assigned vignettes.
However, views may also be sensitive to perceptions of
fairness. Recent high-profile involuntary demolitions
coincided with a doubling of the share responding that
policies are unfair. The increase was further associated
with declining optimism and lower support for the wider
government national development program, beyond urbanization issues. |
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