The report's author, Professor Michael Ball of the University of Reading, said: 'Government intervention has been a hallmark of housing policy around the world for much of the post 1945 period, but the results have often been poor. Market processes are generally the best way to deal with housing problems. Policies need to build up the institutional structures of markets, rather than undermine them, as they have tended to do in the past.'

Improving Housing Markets suggests that private rented housing throughout the world has been driven off the market by over regulation and rent controls. Attempts by many developing countries to copy European social housing policies have often collapsed because such countries lack the resources to make them work.

To improve housing supply, the report recommends reforming property laws to give people clear property rights and the means to enforce them; providing mortgage finance, currently unavailable in most countries; reducing high transaction costs; and putting in place better building regulation and land use planning frameworks.