8月19日，我院钱军教授担任CCTV NEWS《China 24》节目嘉宾，就七月中国住房价格上涨这一问题表达自己的分析。

Qian Jun: So, this is a complicated situation. I think if you use all these academic models on housing prices, for example, the speed in the rise in the prices relative to the speed of the rise in the average household income, it seems that it is rising too fast in housing prices. If you look at the housing price, the rising, increasing housing price relative to rental prices, it is going up too fast. So, I would say, overall, the prices levels are probably still too high. On the other hand, it is encouraging to see that the speed of the rise has slowed down, even the level, in my view, remains too high.

Qian Jun: First of all, I think clearly it shows the governments are aware of the situation. They have been actually very aggressive in coming up with different policies to try to curb the housing price rise. But I think one issue with the curbing of the housing prices is that there are a lot of remain on quantity limitations, that is, you know, there is an administrative order telling people you cannot buy second home, you cannot build, you cannot sell. In general, this kind of quantities based on the administrative orders are not effective as compared to policies based on, for example, appropriate tax, because what appropriate tax does is that, once you buy many homes, there is a tax, there is a cost if you can’t rent them. You know, in the US and many other developed countries, this policy has been used for many years and it is proved to be effective. So, in China, we are starting to see some experimental policies on using appropriate tax. But, I think, in order to make this effective, you have to solve the use of it in most places.

Qian Jun: Certainly, this is a big social concern. And the first factor, reason I list is that the housing price is rising too fast. It is exactly the speed of the rise relative to the speed of the rise of the average households. So, certainly, what you see in China is there are a lot of families. They gain a lot of wealth. They have a lot of capital they can invest; but for ordinary people, you know, you can look at the average household income, it is going up very fast. But certainly, in big cities, it is not catching up to the rising housing prices. So, certainly, not only for economic concerns but also for social purposes, because, you know, housing remains a big part of your life, once you get a job, you get married, obviously, you want your own home. So, I think, in addition to using tools such as appropriate taxes, the other tools, several tools which will be effective is to control, is to base the course of borrow. What’s really driving the prices is people use borrowed money to invest in real estate and if real estate market crushes, this kind of leverage transaction is really damaging. So, I think the other several tools will be very effective if you limit the amount people can borrow, you can increase the interest on the borrowing, borrowing amount. I mean you can actually rise the interest as the amount of the borrowing amount goes up. I think these several tools along with the appropriate tax tools rather than the administrative orders based tools will be more effective.