CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION

1.1 INTRODUCTION
Governments of all political leanings show an interest in their housing sectors, since housing touches people's lives directly. In socialist countries, governments take care of everything including housing. However, capitalist governments are also keen to improve their housing sectors. For instance, both Conservative and Labour governments in the United Kingdom have concentrated on housing at times of closely fought elections demonstrating how important politics has been to public housing investment. In the UK both Conservative and Labour parties attempt to draw as many voters as possible towards them at election time through highlighting this priority.
However, despite this political attention to providing housing particularly in third world countries, several problems still face many countries such as providing infrastructures, education, and health care services and Jordan is one of these countries. One of the most important difficulties in Jordan is housing, which manifests itself in a shortage of housing as a result of insufficient finance where the expenditure ratio on housing in development plans decreased from 25.7% in 1970 to 9.1% in 1992 (General Committee of Planning, 1997). In addition, the General Council of Planning report highlights that there are also finance difficulties faced by the housing sector (General Council of Planning, 2002).
This research deals with the housing problem in Jordan in general, and discusses in particular the estimation of supply and demand functions. It surveys the attempts, which Jordan has made to solve the housing problem and their results, and consequently makes a survey of the procedures adopted by Jordan to attract international investment in a potential solution of the problem. It then considers what Jordan did to attract international investment for this purpose in the