Safety of immovable and land market development Introducing CelkCenter

Abstract

There is general consensus, that the land market „as one of the most important segments of economies„ stands on four main pillars such as registration and cadastre, market based valuation, financial services (mortgage and credit) and general planning. The Central and Eastern European transition economies, heading for the market economy, performed great improvements in the area of the first pillar i.e. land registration and related legal framework and institutional developments. The rest of the other three pillars however are still underdeveloped or needs further developments. It generates additional tasks that the land market situation of this region is also influenced by the forty year practices of the command economy, by those land policies of the transition processes „ not always coming from economic rationality (compensation, restitution etc) „ and by encouraging of the small scale farming. To manage these problems, some of the needed knowledge, practices, international and organisational connections as well as human capital are at our disposal. This, letÂ’s call it knowledge capital, is however unorganised and hidden, resulting in being useless and unable to work. There is a risk for example that several narrow and costly projects are running parallel, each trying to improve one part of the system, not necessarily taking other parts enough into consideration. All this lack of information might lead to efforts that are working against each other. To avoid these and similar situation and furthemore to improve efficiency and effectiveness, knowledge management seems to be one of the most important tools. Having realised this, the Central European Land Knowledge Center (CelkCenter) was established as a result of international initiatives in February 2003. This paper gives an insight on the land market tasks to be solved in the region and the knowledge management tools to be applied by CelkCenter.