BOOK REVIEW Housing Allowances in Comparative Perspective

In many advanced Northwestern European welfare states, a shift occurred in the second half of the last century from supply-side to demand-side subsidies, the most common form being called housing allowances (HA), though they exist under diVerent names. Nowadays their aim is to ensure that homes of reasonable quality are aVordable to lower-income households (income dependency). In countries such as Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, the US and Australia, HA have become a key instrument in housing policy, now that supply-side subsidies have been reduced or abolished. Ten years after Peter Kemp’s (1997) international comparison of HA, the many changes warrant a new publication. Both books acknowledge that HA are part of a broader welfare system, and both use welfare system classiWcations to justify the selection of countries to be compared. The 2007 book adopts the welfare regimes of Esping-Andersen (1990) when classifying Wve of the ten countries as a liberal regime (Australia, New Zealand, Canada, US and Great Britain) and two each as conservative (France and Germany) and social democratic regimes (Netherlands and Sweden). In order to include a country in transition to a market economy, the new book contains a chapter on the Czech Republic, though it is no