关键词: 房价收入比（PIR）, 住房问题, 时空演变, 尺度效应, 中国

Abstract:

The real estate industry of China has developed high-speed since 1998, when the welfare housing distribution was cancelled and the housing was commercialized completely. Especially since 2003, China's per capita GDP went over $1 000, the economy transformed into the take-off stage, and the commercial housing price rose into a fast lane. The housing problem is becoming prominent increasingly. For Chinese residents, owning a house has become an important part of Chinese Dream. Housing price to income ratio (PIR) is a commonly used indicator on the housing problem study. First of all, this article summarized and extended the connotation of PIR from the perspective of social, economic, and humanistic care. PIR is the measurer of housing affordability, the indicator of bubbles in the real estate market, and one of the important measurement indexes for measuring subjective well-being of citizens. In view of the lack of space and scale in the current research, the significance of studying PIR from the perspective of geography was put forward. On this basis, using ESDA and coefficient variation, the space-time evolution characteristics and distribution rules of China's urban PIR from 1999-2012 were analyzed from multi-scale (nation, province and city) systematically. Major conclusions can be drawn as follows: 1) The space-time evolution characteristics of China's urban PIR presented scale effect clearly. National scale showed fluctuations in the rising, provincial scale changed from rise to variance, and city scale rose like a flying geese. Besides this, PIR existed an obvious spatial autocorrelation under the provincial and city scale from 2007-2011, which indicated the co-movement of adjacent real estate market space enhanced significantly in China in recent years. 2) There were about 70% of the citizens living in big and medium-sized cities, whose revenue growth could not catch up with the housing price growth. Some of the cities were more likely to generate bubbles. With the housing affordability declining, the well-being of citizens also decreased gradually. 3) The spatial difference of PIR between provinces in the east and whole of China reduced before 2003, and increased after that. The difference between provinces in the central and western region shrank consecutively. The difference under city scale was larger than that of provincial scale dramatically. This change indicated the existence of scale effect and zoning effect. In brief, the conclusion revealed the regional difference and scale effect of PIR in China, which eliminated the common misunderstanding and could provide regional policy orientation and theoretical basis.

Key words: housing price to income ratio (PIR), housing problem, spatio-temporal evolution, scale effect, China