New numbers from the Bank of International Settlements may fuel concerns that the Australian housing market is overheated. The statistics, available at http://bit.ly/dlFeOV, bring together for the first time housing price data from 37 countries. They show that since 1996, prices for existing Australian capital city dwellings are up 222 per cent. That rise is larger than for almost any other developed nation. Australia is also one of the few countries to record substantial rises over the past three years - 29 per cent in the three years to March 2010.The new statistics also confirm that New Zealand's housing market has risen more moderately than many, up just 120 per cent since 1996. And the figures suggest that US housing prices have risen more gently than those of most other advanced economies.This is the BIS's first release of its global property price statistics. The global financial regulator notes that the data are imperfect. The lack of international comparative property price statistics has been named by the IMF as a substantial problem for global economic management.Economists are divided on the effects of these price changes, and are not yet delivering a consensus on when or how central bankers should act. Based on its own figures and a comparison with rents, The Economist magazine ranks Australia's market as "the most overvalued of any of the 20 countries we track". Others, like Rismark's Christopher Joye, set more store by the relationship between housing prices and incomes, which has remained stable since 2004 after surging in the early years of the decade. The Reserve Bank of Australia has explained recent home price rises partly as the natural result of increasing the population while constraining the housing industry's ability to build.  But the 2008 crisis has left central bankers more sensitive to changes in asset prices, and especially changes in prices of housing assets.