奥大统计学教授的这篇文章很有条理
即使说华人的购买量比较大,但是
So, there is fairly goodevidence that people of Chinese ethnicity are buying houses in Auckland ata higher rate than their proportion of the population.
TheLabour claim extends this by saying that many of the buyers must be foreign.The data say nothing one way or the other about this, and it’s not obvious thatit’s true. More precisely, since the existence of foreign investors is notreally in doubt, it’s not obvious how far it’s true. The simple numbersdon’t imply much, because relatively few people are housing buyers: forexample, house buyers named “Wang” in the data set are less than 4% of Aucklandresidents named “Wang.” There are at least three other competingexplanations, and probably more.
First,recent migrants are more likely to buy houses. I bought a house three yearsago. I hadn’t previously bought one in Auckland. I bought it because I hadmoved to Auckland and I wanted somewhere to live. Consistent with thisexplanation, people with Korean and Indian names, while not over-represented tothe same extent are also more likely to be buying than selling houses, by aboutthe same ratio as Chinese.
Second,it could be that (some subset of) Chinese New Zealanders prefer real estate asan investment to, say, stocks (to an even greater extent than Aucklanders ingeneral).
Third, it could easily be that (some subset of) Chinese NewZealanders have a higher savings rate than other New Zealanders, and so havemore money to invest in houses.
Personally,I’d guess that all these explanations are true: that Chinese New Zealanders (onaverage) buy both homes and investment properties more than other NewZealanders, and that there are foreign propertyinvestors of Chinese ethnicity. But that’s a guess: these data don’t tell us —as the Herald explicitly points out.
One ofthe repeated points I make on StatsChat is that you need to distinguishbetween what you measured and what you wanted to measure. Using ‘Chinese’as a surrogate for ‘foreign’ will capture many New Zealanders and miss out onmany foreigners.
The misclassifications aren’t just unavoidable bad luck, either. If you have ameasure of ‘foreign real estate ownership’ that includes my next-doorneighbours and excludes James Cameron, you’re doing it wrong, and in a way thathas a long and reprehensible political history. But ontop of that, if there is substantial foreign investment and ifit is drivingup prices, that’s only because of the artificial restrictions on the supply ofAuckland houses. If Auckland could get its consent and zoning right, so thatmore money meant more homes, foreign investment wouldn’t be a problem forpeople trying to find somewhere to live. That’s a real problem, and it’s onethat lies within the power of governments to solve. |