An MCDM Approach to Review the Situation of Iran in the Middle East in Macroeconomic Indicators: Using TOPSIS Method

For more than three decades, the World Economic Forum’s annual competitiveness reports have examined the many factors enabling national economies to achieve sustained economic growth and long-term prosperity. A number of new countries have been added every year. Iran is one of these countries which is added to global competitiveness report 2010-2011 for first time. So, in this article, it is a good opportunity to use data from global competitiveness report to review country's conditions in macroeconomic indicators among a list of countries. Twelve middle eastern countries plus Iran are in this list. To discover the situation of Iran, one of the most famous multicriteria decision making methods is used. It is called TOPSIS. TOPSIS is a technique to evaluate the performance of alternatives through the similarity with the ideal solution developed by Hwang and Yoon (1981). According to this technique, the best alternative would be one that is closest to the positive-ideal solution and farthest from the negative-ideal solution. In this TOPSIS problem, there are 6 criteria and 13 alternatives. The alternatives are 13 middle eastern countries which are prioritized according to 6 macroeconomic indicators as criteria. The final result shows that Iran is ranked in 8th place. By using this method, experts are able to evaluate the performance of economic strategies which are used against sanctions.

کلیدواژه ها:

Macroeconomics ، TOPSIS ، Iran ، Middle East