Measuring the Economic Impacts of Sub-Saharan African Urban Real-Estate Policies: Methodological Discussions

Abstract

In recent times, the approaches used to the modelling of the economic impacts of exogenous interventions have become increasingly sophisticated. However, even though huge resources have been expended on developing and implementing development programmes in sub-Saharan Africa, many of which have a significant real estate component, little effort has been made to assess in any rigorous sense their true impacts. This paper presents a quantitative framework by which the impacts of these real estate policies can be more objectively ascertained. The framework devised in this paper harnessed the strengths of a number of existing conventional models that are popular in the west to evolve a hybrid model that has due regard for the generally noisy data conditions of sub-Saharan Africa. The formulated framework is portable across the respective countries of Africa and the developing world. (RICS)