Multicriteria approaches to regional competitiveness and disparities

Regional competitiveness is the source of national competitiveness. This paper presents multi-criteria decision making methods for evaluation of the regional competitiveness and regional differences and disparities. Specific coefficients reflect economic productivity of the region in form of factors of production inside of the region. The technology for evaluation of regional competitiveness is based on application of three methods of multi-criteria decision making. The first one is the classical weighted average where relevance of criteria's significance is determined by the method of lvanovic deviation. The second method - FVK is a multiplicative version of AHP, the third method is the well known DEA. The results of the methods are compared with the simple averaging. On the basis of the multi-criteria techniques, we obtain a more detailed perspective in the study of the competitiveness of the NUTS3 regions in the Czech Republic and also NUTS2 regions (V4 - Visegrad Four countries) in EU within the time period of 7 years (2000 2006). Particularly, disparities between Czech and Slovak NUTS2 regions are identified.