InterCriteria Decision Making Approach to EU Member States Competitiveness Analysis: Temporal and Threshold Analysis

Abstract

In this paper, we present some interesting findings from the application of our recently developed InterCriteria Decision Making (ICDM) approach to data extracted from the World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness Reports for the years 2008–2009 to 2013–2014 for the current 28 Member States of the European Union. The developed approach which employs the apparatuses of index matrices and intuitionistic fuzzy sets is designed to produce from an existing index matrix with multiobject multicriteria evaluations a new index matrix that contains intuitionistic fuzzy pairs with the correlations revealed to exist in between the set of evaluation criteria, which are not obligatory there ‘by design’ of the WEF’s methodology but exist due to the integral, organic nature of economic data. Here, we analyse the data from the six-year period within a reasonably chosen intervals for the thresholds of the intuitionistic fuzzy functions of membership and non-membership, and make a series of observations about the current trends in the factors of competitiveness of the European Union. The whole research and the conclusions derived are in line with WEF’s address to state policy makers to identify and strengthen the transformative forces that will drive future economic growth.