A multi‐criteria approach for determination of investment regions: Turkish case

The major aim of this research is to determine the socio‐economic level of geographical investment regions through fuzzy multi‐criteria decision‐making (MCDM) method. The results obtained from this method are analyzed and compared with the current system and the differences are interpreted.

A user friendly MCDM method, the fuzzy TOPSIS, was selected and ten independent criteria out of 53 were used, that have been evaluated by reduction according to the correlations among them. Therefore, the rankings of the 26 geographical investment regions of Turkey were calculated based on their criteria.

The examinations of the rankings have shown that only four regions had similar rankings but the rankings of the remaining 22 regions differed according to the authority rankings. Furthermore, significant differences have been observed for eight regions.

In globalization process, certain issues are of particular importance in shaping the resource allocation policies of countries, through which they adjust their resources for manufacturing and service sectors to the changing competitive conditions and govern the effect of global economics on the human resources of their countries. The allowances taken from social and economic criteria have indicated the inter‐regional differences in terms of development.

From a policy perspective, this study highlighted that a large number of social and economic criteria failed in identifying homogenous groups of provinces and hence failed in producing realistic policies. However, the proposed method significantly contributed to obtaining more accurate rankings by using fuzzy decision‐making under multi‐criteria.