Annex A. The OECD-MMR housing survey of municipalities in the Czech Republic
In co-operation with the Ministry of Regional Development of the Czech Republic (MMR), the OECD carried out a survey of 1 877 Czech municipalities in August/September 2020 to collect data on the housing market and housing policies at the municipal level. The survey covered all municipalities within functional urban areas (FUAs) of more than 50 000 inhabitants as defined by the OECD,1 as well as the municipalities within the FUAs of Jablonec and Mladá Boleslav. A total of 871 municipalities (corresponding to 46.5% of all surveyed municipalities) responded to the survey as of 15 October 2020. Figure A A.1 shows the municipalities covered by the survey and their response status.
Source: OECD/MMR (2020[1]), OECD-MMR Housing Survey of Municipalities in the Czech Republic.
The survey collected detailed data on local housing markets, local housing policies and local land use regulations. It focused primarily on the following aspects:
Land use regulations and planning policies (zoning by land use, density regulations, regulatory plans and the permitting process).
Housing construction and constraints for residential development.
The survey aimed to collect data that is internationally comparable, while still capturing all important aspects of local housing and land use policies. Therefore, it contained sections that were designed to be applicable across countries, as well as sections that were targeted specifically at the Czech context. The survey instrument consisted of approximately 100 closed-ended questions.
The OECD-MMR housing survey was administered to local government officials on an online platform, by an external Czech survey provider. The objective was to receive one set of answers per surveyed municipality. If available, the survey provider contacted a specific official within a municipality and, otherwise, the municipality through generic contact details. Local officials and municipalities were contacted by postal mail, email and phone on behalf of the OECD and the Czech national government. When no response was received from municipalities, the survey provider sent up to four reminders to increase the response rate. Respondents were given one month in total to fill in their answers independently on the online platform.
Two different versions of the survey instrument were administered depending on the type of municipalities. Municipalities with extended powers – which fulfil administrative functions for assigned municipalities without extended powers – had to complete the full survey, including specific questions on their extended competencies, while municipalities without extended powers answered a reduced set of questions. The survey, moreover, instructed to provide the latest available information, up to March 2020. The survey was administered in Czech.
The 871 municipalities that responded to the survey are home to 2.8 out of 6 million inhabitants in the Czech Republic. Overall, responding municipalities were representative of the surveyed municipalities in the sense that there was no difference in population and age structure among responding and non-responding municipalities. Thus, no correction was done to account for potential biases when calculating municipality level statistics. However, within FUAs, there were instances where there existed bias when comparing the responding and non-responding groups. As FUA level statistics are an aggregation of municipal-level data, information for municipalities that did not respond to the survey was partially extrapolated from the answers that other municipalities that did respond provided, together with external data observable for all municipalities. Thus, the data presented in the following may differ somewhat from data that is obtained from other data sources. In addition, the survey data was cleaned through statistical means to account for erroneous answers and implausible values.
The survey aimed to collect information that is not available in the Czech statistical system with a view to supporting the formulation of housing policy recommendations. It does not claim to replace official statistics but to complement them. In the case where no official statistics were available to support the answers to this survey, respondent municipalities were invited to provide approximate answers to the best of their knowledge.
Note
← 1. The European Commission and the OECD have jointly developed a methodology to define FUAs in a consistent way across countries. Using population density and travel-to-work flows as key information, an FUA consists of a densely inhabited city and of a surrounding area (commuting zone) whose labour market is highly integrated with the city (Dijkstra, Poelman and Veneri, 2019[2]). The ultimate aim of the EC-OECD approach to FUAs is to create a harmonised definition of cities and their areas of influence for international comparison as well as for policy analysis on topics related to urban development.