The research of socio-economic development ranking of provinces and regions in Turkey: Grey relational analysis method and its application

In order to overcome regional disparities, firstly, development ranking must be defined through researches which comparitively expose the spatial socio-economic structure of the country. This study aims to define geographical regions and NUTS development levels of Turkey. Grey relational analysis, an important technique to detect relational structure among systems is applied to fulfill this aim. This method provides the decision maker to use personal initiative by the means of weights and gives efficient results in social aspects. This study adopts data of ?socio-economic development level ranking of provinces and regions? research performed by SPO which consists of 58 socio-economic indicators for 81 provinces. Sectoral analysis are done through sectoral indicators used by the same research. Firstly a survey is performed among experts who are asked to make pairwise comparisons through Analytical Hierarchy and define the comparative importance degrees for the indicators. Then surveys are evaluated and relative weight are determined through Analytical Hierarchy Process. Finally rankings are formed through grey relational degrees found by application of Grey Relational Analysis using MATLAB software. As a result grey system theory gives consistent results in measuring regional socio-economic disparities. The similarity of socio-economic structure to grey system, the application simplicity and less assumptions represents grey relational analysis as an alternative for current methods. Therefore this method can be used to determine the socio-economic disparities as an initial step for formulating policies about reducing regional differences, increasing welfare of citizens and minimizing tendency of migration.