The Dutch housing market is in crisis; young adults continue to live at home for too long en masse and thus postpone family formation. Meanwhile, dozens of percent of 30-year-olds are still living with their parents, a development that was rare 20 years ago. The low birth rates well below the replacement rate of 2.2 children per woman are linked to the inability to finance homeownership. Hundreds of thousands of home seekers face "deranged" rents in major cities, with renting often as expensive as the monthly burden of buying a home.
At the same time, homeowners benefit from spectacular capital gains; the average excess value is now around four tons. Yet this gain mainly provides the government with additional income, via higher real estate and millionaire's taxes once homes pass the one million euro threshold. For individual owners, the surplus value offers little solace. Moving to a larger or more expensive home quickly means that this surplus value is once again locked into the price, while renting is not an attractive alternative either.
In the United States, a similar gap is emerging between official figures and day-to-day labor market practices. Where the government publishes an unemployment rate of 4.1 percent, an independent institute figures that the real unemployment rate including people with part-time jobs of less than 35 hours and highly skilled workers in unskilled positions is closer to 24 percent. This discrepancy raises the question of how reliable policy can be when layers of government rely on manipulated data.
The combination of inaccessible housing and unclear labor market figures underscores the urgency for sweeping policies. Accelerating housing construction without unnecessary regulation is as necessary as recalibrating tax incentives that disproportionately favor homeowners. In addition, transparency in unemployment statistics requires renewed confidence in state figures and targeted incentives for jobs that match educational attainment and aspirations. Only by taking these measures can the squeezing grip of deficits on Dutch society be eased.
Suriname must analyze this situation, and protect society by investing in affordable housing and labor market transparency in a timely manner. By simplifying building regulations and encouraging public-private partnerships, new housing developments can be completed faster without costly delays especially now that oil and gas developments are here. At the same time, it is recommended that unemployment figures not only be reported on the basis of formal jobs, but also include under- and part-time jobs and mismatches between education and job. This will provide a more realistic picture of the labor market and allow targeted training to be designed to sustainably improve both the living and working situation of Surinamese.
