Among Critical Issues again

A paper based on this research, co-authored with my Kingston University supervisors, is about to be published by Richmond Law & Tax in the third volume of their international series Critical Issues in Environmental Taxation. It takes a snapshot of my findings as at April this year and is titled A Revealing Landvaluescape: Making Property Tax More Acceptable Using Value Maps. An earlier draft of the article is http://www.landvaluescape.org/archives/GETC5prism.doc

Among the conclusions of this 'work in progress' are:

"The political and institutional aspects of value mapping are far more difficult and important than the technical aspects"

and

"Transitional economies in Europe that are creating their property markets and geo-spatial data infrastructures from scratch are very likely to lead the way with value mapping...."

This is confirmed in an article in the British magazine Valuer by senior officials in the Lithuanian State Enterprise Centre of Registers: Putting Lithuania on the Map. Unfortunately this is not available in electronic form. However it shows that value maps can be justified without needing to come from the property tax office. Market-based publicly accessible land valuation systems help to improve the operation of property markets.