Ranking of the Member Countries in the Black Sea Economic Cooperation Organization Using Multi-Criteria Decision-Making Methods

Abstract

The objective of the study is to measure and rank the performance of the Black Sea Economic Cooperation Organization (BSECO) member countries for the different four years using Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) techniques widely used in performance measurement. This is the first study using CRITIC (Criteria Importance through Intercritera Correlation), COPRAS (Compress PRoportional ASssessment- Complex Relative Assessment) and Borda Count Methods to rank countries on basic energy indicators using MCDM. The CRITIC method was used to calculate the critical weights of the criteria established in the first stage of the three-stage work. It is an objective method of MCDM. The performance of BSECO member countries is ranked using the COPRAS method. The weights calculated in the second stage are used for the ranking. In the last stage, using the Borda count method, which is a data fusion technique, a single ranking was obtained by integrating the rankings obtained under different scenarios. According to this result, Albania was the first, Georgia was the second and Armenia was the third. The last place was taken by Türkiye. Thus, MCDM techniques can provide effective and comprehensive results in this kind of problems. It can be observed that the unbiased results are objective measures of the criteria used.