Assessment of development regions for financial support allocation with fuzzy decision making: A case of Turkey

European Union is a project focused on the balanced distribution of the prosperity, established by the common market, to all regions. For this purpose, in order to collect comparable statistics, socio-economic zones have been established within the framework of certain criteria using the classification of Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics (NUTS). These regions are formed in 3 levels, based on the countries that are members and candidates for membership. Supports provided within the framework of the EU in order to reduce regional socioeconomic disparities and to ensure regional development are being made and measured on the basis of regions (development zones) established with Level 2 NUTS. As a candidate country to the EU, Turkey also tries to achieve harmonization and regional development through Instrument for Pre-Accession Assistance (IPA). In this study, the extent to which the development regions identified in the Turkish scale should benefit from such supports is assessed on the basis of specific criteria. How to distribute IPA support, which is a limited resource, to the regions according to framework agreements and regional development goals is a complex issue. In order to solve this problem, development zones are evaluated using two different Multi Criteria Decision Making methods: Fuzzy-PROMETHEE and Fuzzy-MULTIMOORA. As a result, a framework to provide specific distribution of funds to support regional development and to show the weaknesses of these regions is presented.