Land Register delays taking toll on doing business
Greece mapped just 25.3 percent of its territory for the Land Register, at a cost of 1.1 billion euros – and counting – by the end of 2016 because of needless delays and waste. According to the World Bank’s annual Doing Business report for 2017, these delays, along with outdated procedures, put Greece in 141st place among 200 countries in registering properties.
How far Greece lags developed nations is more than apparent in the land administration index, which measures the reliability of infrastructure, transparency of information, geographic coverage, land dispute resolution and equal access to property rights indices. With a perfect score of 30, the World Bank gave Greece just 4.5 points, against the 22.7 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development average.
According to the report, a businessman who wants to acquire a plot of land with a building in Greece needs to complete 10 separate procedures, compared to the OECD average of 4.7.
