Housing policy towards the rental sector in Italy: a distributive assessment

We study the distributive effects on Italian households of the three most relevant housing subsidies targeted to renters: a national rent supplement scheme introduced in the context ofthe reform that liberalised the rental market in the late 1990s, a tax credit for renters that has been recently strengthened and the implicit economic support given to tenants in the social housingsector, through below-market rents. The analysis is performed on data from the Eu-Silc survey for Italy and, in the case of the housing allowances, also on register data from 9 out of the 13 largest Italian towns. We consider, in particular, the ability of these schemes to target low-income households and their effects on the overall levels of poverty and inequality. Results from our analysis show a good targeting but very limited effect on social protection, with the partial exception of social housing.