Investigation of the competitiveness of businesses in the context of Turkey's sustainability map: An analysis through multi-criteria decision making methods

Practices endangering sustainable life have caused many problems such as global climate change, deforestation, desertification, biodiversity decline, inequalities, and poverty. In the face of these problems, the understanding of sustainable development that envisages intergenerational justice has started to be adopted by countries. For a sustainable life, it is aimed to address today's needs rationally without jeopardizing the ability of future generations to fulfill their needs without exceeding the self-renewal rate and carrying capacity of the ecosystem. In this study, it was aimed to reveal the sustainability status of the Provinces and Regions of Turkey in line with the 17 Sustainable Development Goals declared by the United Nations in 2015, the potential impact of this status on the competitiveness of businesses, and the current status of businesses listed in the BIST 100 Index on the basis of criteria (current ratio, profit before tax, earnings per share, equity, and return on assets) determined as the indicators of competitiveness comparing the businesses that adopt sustainable practices and the ones that do not. SWOT Analysis, ratio analysis from financial analyses techniques, Entropy and TOPSIS methods from Multi Criteria Decision Making Techniques were used in the analysis. Within the scope of the performed analyses, it was concluded that the Provinces and Regions of Turkey do not have an adequate level of sustainability performance in general and this situation may negatively impact the competitiveness of businesses; a balanced development cannot be achieved due to the deep performance differences between provinces; performance differences between provinces are higher, especially in environmental and economic sustainability compared to social sustainability; the businesses that are both included in the BIST 100 Index and BIST Sustainability Index do not have a better performance in the context of the criteria determined as the indicators of competitiveness.