Usage of AHP and topsis method for regional disparities evaluation in visegrad countries
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Date
2013-08
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Technická Univerzita v Liberci
Technical university of Liberec, Czech Republic
Technical university of Liberec, Czech Republic
Abstract
The socio-economic disparities in the level of the regional performance are a major obstacle to the balanced and harmonious development of the regions, but also of the territory as a whole. At supranational level, it is European Union (EU) that supports the elimination of differences between less and most developed Member States and regions to strengthen the cohesion and competitiveness of European territory. The effort to reduce the economic, social and territorial disparities has especially increased since the EU biggest enlargement. The accession of new Member States has been associated with an increase in regional disparities that have negatively affected the EU competitiveness in global scale. The strengthening of competitiveness and convergence of economic performance with an average level of the EU have become the basic objectives for new Member States. The Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia, called Visegrad Four countries (V4), belong to new Member States whose economic development of the last 10 years has been strongly influenced by EU accession. Although the regional disparities have been reduced in V4 with contribution of EU Cohesion policy, negative disparities have still persisted. This paper is aimed to evaluate the regional disparities of socio-economic development in V4 in the period 2000-2010 using analytic hierarchic process (AHP) and TOPSIS method. Theoretical background of the paper outlines the concept of regional disparities in the EU and focuses on AHP and TOPSIS methodology. TOPSIS is one of the multicriteria decision-making methods that can present an alternative way of regional disparities and its evaluation. The empirical part of the paper deals with multi-criteria evaluation and comparison of differences between NUTS 2 regions in V4 based on selected economic, social and territorial indicators. At first, the weights of indicators for disparities evaluation are computed based on method of pairwise comparison in the context of AHP. Through TOPSIS method the ranking of regions is determined in year 2000, 2005 and 2010.
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AHP, multicriteria decision-making method, pairwise comparison, regional disparity, TOPSIS, Visegrad Four
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978-80-7372-953-0