Zebo Kuldasheva

Type of the article: Research Article

Abstract
Housing affordability and mortgage-market development remain important challenges in Central Asia, where long-term housing finance is constrained by differences in financial-system development, borrowing costs, household incomes, and institutional capacity. This study examines the relationship between international housing-finance interventions and mortgage-market development in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and the Kyrgyz Republic over 2020–2025. Using 18 country-year observations, the analysis combines the Mortgage-to-GDP ratio and outstanding mortgage portfolios with two indicators of international financial activity: IFI Finance and IFI Projects. Real interest rates, inflation, and real GDP growth are included as macro-financial controls, while Price-to-Income and Mortgage Burden provide supplementary measures of housing affordability. The empirical analysis employs descriptive statistics, Pearson correlations, pooled OLS regressions with lagged and contemporaneous IFI variables, diagnostic tests, and HC3 heteroskedasticity-consistent inference. The results do not provide stable evidence of a significant association between IFI-supported activity and Mortgage-to-GDP. Lagged IFI Projects are significant only in one specification and lose significance under HC3 estimation, while neither contemporaneous IFI variable is significant. In contrast, real interest rates show more consistent positive associations with mortgage-market depth, while the relationship with real GDP growth requires caution because GDP is the denominator of the dependent variable. Mortgage Burden is associated with Mortgage-to-GDP, whereas evidence for Price-to-Income is weaker. The findings indicate that international housing-finance interventions should be interpreted alongside domestic macro-financial and institutional conditions rather than as independent determinants of mortgage-market development.