Transforming government and the public sector

AuthorBellia, M.; Kounelis, I.; Anderberg, A.; Calès, L.; Andonova, E.; Pólvora, A.; Petracco Giudici, M.; Nascimento, S.; Inamorato dos Santos, A.; Rossetti, F.; Papanagiotou, E.; Nai Fovino, I.; Spirito, L.; Sobolewski, M.
Pages87-100
87 6. Transforming government and the public sector
TRANSFORMING
GOVERNMENT AND
THE PUBLIC SECTOR
6.1. Land and property transactions
Blockchain is a new general-purpose information
technology for record-keeping a nd the settlement
of complex transactions (Davidson et al., 2016).
These features have specif‌ic implications
in the context of public administrations
and governments, for insta nce.
In public administrations, numerous registries
containing citizen, ta x or land title records are
costly in terms of maintenance, pron e to human
errors, and exposed t o one point of failure.
Public administrations can use t his technology
for the distributed registrat ion of documents
and assets rather t han solely registering in
a centralised way. The benef‌its of blockc hain
technology for public ser vices are argued
to include the ability t o provide tailored
services for specif‌ic citizens, gr eater trust
in governments and improved automation,
transparency a nd auditability (At zori, 2015, 2017;
Norta, 2015; Swan, 2015; Van Zuidam, 2017).
Distributed registration and exchange of citizen
records, such as birth cert if‌icates, land titles
or criminal records, could be particularly useful
for citizens in countries where the cent ralised
information infrastruct ure is either less developed,
unreliable or corrupted.
As one of eight ongoing project s on blockchain
for digital government in Europe recent ly analysed
by the JRC (Allessie et al., 2019), the Nationa l
Agency of Public Registry (NAPR) of the
Republic of Georgia, in par tnership with The
Bitfury Group, is using blockchain technology to
provide its citizens with a digita l certif‌icate of their
land titles. This blockc hain pilot currently enables
registration of the purcha ses and sales of land
titles and registration of new land titles (over 100
000 since April 2016). The aim is to increase pu blic
conf‌idence in property-related record-keeping
and ultimately to help Georgia f‌ight corruption
and disputes over propert y claims (Eurasianet,
2017; The Bitfury Group, 2017). In the future,
the system is also exp ected to provide registration
of the demolition of propert y, mortgages and
rentals, and not ary services (Forbes, 2017a).
Blockchain has
of‌fered a set
of incremental
rather than radical
innovations, although
some of them can
make a huge
economic dif‌ference.

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