- heterogeneity in the “free or other” category, where significant number of relationships is likely to imply in-kind payments including labor;

- stigmatization of tenants in an environment of mass homeownership, which might lead to false claims of tenure status;

- sharing of residential dwellings, where two households, often related, occupy a dwelling. By definition only one will be registered as formal owner or tenant, so the other should be deemed as renting, even though without a formal contract and payments.

It is strongly recommended that countries interested in explicit rental housing policies should design systematic and consistent rental housing surveys, to avoid expensive incidental research efforts to distill the required data and information. An outline of such a survey is provided in Annex 2.

Bearing these limitations in mind and considering other data sources and anecdotal evidence allows the following preliminary rapid assessments for each country (Figure 4):

- According to the LSMS, the rental market in Armenia is relatively small at 7.3 percent, of which the lion’s share (5.8 percent) is non-privatized public apartments. Both ratios are substantiated by the 2001 census results. The private rental sector share of 1.3 percent is marginal, considering the country’s share of M-F stock, and likely has a significant element of under-reporting caused by tax evasion and tenants’ confusion about their status. This sector is concentrated in Yerevan. The public rental sector, in contrast, has remained relatively large, since non-privatized stock owned by the central government was transferred to the municipalities. The share is the highest in the earthquake zone of Gumri and Vanadzor.

- The 2002 household survey undertaken in Lithuania by the Lithuanian Free Market Institute<sup>22</sup> shows that 17.4 percent the households live in non-owner-occupied housing. A total of 10.5 percent of the households polled live in housing owned by other individuals; 3.8 percent in state-owned or municipal housing; and 1.7 percent in housing units that belong to an enterprise, institution, organization, or other legal entity. These results appear plausible, given that incentives for tax evasion and hence underreporting were reduced recently. The rental sector is relatively evenly distributed among urban areas.<sup>23</sup>

- With an estimate of slightly over one-third of households, the survey arrives at a similarly plausible non-owner-occupied share for the Polish housing market. The 2002 census data indicate a rental sector share of approximately 31 percent, roughly divided equally between public (municipal, state, non-profit TBS) and private (professional, individual, cooperative, and enterprise). Approximately 40 percent of the cooperative housing units in Poland are rented. The professional / formal apartment-building private rental sector is

> 22  The survey was undertaken within the work on national housing strategy supported by the PHRD Japanese government grant administered by the World Bank.

> 23  In the region of Vilnius, the non-owner-occupied sector reaches 19 percent, of which 4 percent are public rental and 13.6 percent private rental. These values are not far above the country average.

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