Like all exercises of synthesis, this one potentially faces the criticism of overlooking prominent aspects of the housing subsidy systems. It is worth emphasizing that our battery of criteria is just a practical tool for summarizing various aspects of particular programs and comparing them. Assessing the various aspects of a particular program, which is the basic input needed to apply our methodology, still remains a complicated exercise to be undertaken by specialists. We nonetheless believe that our framework can be used in useful ways, the first of which is to provide a simple pedagogical tool allowing more comparable studies on different countries or programs. For policymakers or governments seeking ways to improve their housing policies, the aggregation technique provided in this paper provides a synthetic way to assess the basic features of the housing subsidy system as a whole, but also a quick way to compare the system to those of neighbors or similar countries. The framework may also help go beyond the usual “best -worst practice” presentation. A particular program may be ranked high along some criteria, and not so well along others. Even programs widely recognized as “best practices” could be enhanced in some dimension. Practitioners may then want to address other comparable programs that fare better in that particular dimension.

Last but not least, we believe that the very nature of the evaluation exercise forces policymakers and experts to consider explicitly how and why they believe a program performs against a specific standard. The aggregation exercise in turn forces one to look at all kinds of subsidies, visible and less visible. As emphasized above, very large implicit subsidies often receive far less attention than they would deserve, simply because their visibility is low. In that case, focusing on more visible but less important types of subsidies can lead to inefficient use of money and loss of credibility by governments trying to reform the housing subsidy system.

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