has more than 50 million vacant houses

Chinese President Xi Jinping's mantra, whose homes are to be inhabited, falls into a shattered bag. There are tens of millions of homes and vacant apartments in the country

According to a forthcoming study, about 22% of China's urban housing stock is vacant, according to Professor Gan Li, who heads the # 39; main study. This represents more than 50 million empty houses, he said.

The nightmare scenario for authorities is that vacant homeowners will rush to sell if cracks start to appear on the real estate market and a spiral of price will be generated. The latest data, from a 2017 survey, also suggest that Beijing's efforts to curb real estate speculation – that the authorities see as a major threat to social and economic stability – are not enough . "No other country has this percentage of unoccupied houses," said Gan, of the Chengdu University of Economics and Finance. "If a crack appears on the real estate market, homes for sale will flood China."

One solution that the government could adopt is to create property taxes or empty houses to try to tackle the problem but none of this seems imminent and some researchers , including Gan, argue that it could be complex to define unemployment.

Thousands of researchers visited 363 countries last year as part of the economic survey. from China Homes, which Gan heads to the university. The unemployment rate, which excludes homes that developers have not yet sold, has not changed much from the 2013 record of 22.4 percent, said Gan, who said stated that he was filling in the data for dissemination. ] The 2013 study found 49 million vacant dwellings, and Gan says the figure is now "certainly greater than 50 million units" .

Real estate speculation irritates the Chinese authorities for years . Some cities and provinces have increased restrictions on the purchase and the only result has been that the money has been transferred to other regions. High prices also mean that millions of people are excluded from the market, exacerbating inequalities. Last October, Xi declared that "houses are built to install them, not for speculative purposes" .

Vacancies and vacant housing of migrants looking for work elsewhere are a few According to Mr. Gan, the purchase of vacant properties is a determining factor for maintaining a rate of high unemployment, despite the restrictions that limit the purchase of several homes throughout the country.

Unemployment also has a cost. economic because it limits supply, pushing up prices and excludes young buyers from the market, according to Kaiji Chen, co-author of a study of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis entitled "The big real estate boom" in China. "