Cost Action - Public Value Capture of increasing Property Values

The shortage of financial resources is a Europe-wide problem. Coming out of the economic and financial crisis, countries as well as municipalities have decreasing means to fulfil all their public commitments. For this reason, the main aim of this COST Action is the development of a common framework for value capturing and the provision of innovative tools for public value capture based on comparative analysis to optimize the allocation of development costs and benefits as well as to disencumber the public budget. While a considerable database exists, it nonetheless shows big gaps in the data and in some cases disagreement between sources of data. Because of the different terms of unearned increments and classifications of value capture it is not possible to compare different studies of several countries. This gives strength to the idea of approaching the European Union for a study based on a network of specialist country representatives to get a common terminology and classification. A very important result will be the implementation of a permanent Europe-wide network of land management experts to interchange the knowledge concerning public value capture and its dissemination to policy-makers and the general public. This network allows the improvement of existing tools by detailed discussions with experts of countries that have similar tools. On the other hand, thought-provoking impulses can be given by countries that have a totally different understanding of value capture. Participants from more than 20 countries are willing to work for the socio-economic breakthrough of public value capture.