Modeling for Advantage Measuring of Dairy Industry in Iranian Provinces, Using Multi-criteria Decision Making Methods

Production advantage measuring is a branch of economics with strong linkages with microeconomics and macroeconomics. Regarding microeconomics, entrepreneurs try to choose places for their activities in which they can earn the highest profits. Also regarding macroeconomics, determination of regional advantages is important, because of its effects on optimal allocation of resources in the economy. In this paper we rank Iranian provinces according to their advantage levels for dairy industry. Thus firstly theories and models of advantage measuring and its factors were reviwed. Then because of the numerous factors influencing growth and development of this industry, multi-criteria models were surveyed and evaluated, among which, two models- weighted numerical taxonomy and AHP- were choosen for determination of advantage level of Iranian provinces subject to dairy industry. Then by collecting the necessary data and calculating importance coefficients for advantage determination factors- using the industry experts ideas, around the country- we ran the relative models and surveyed the results. The results of this paper show that Tehran and after it, Qom, Qazvin, Guilan and Khozestan have the most advantage level for dairy industry development. Also the correlation coefficient between province rankings with WNT and AHP calculated about 0.93 which suggests the high capability of substitution between these two methods. In fact these methods with high degree of reliability, confirm each other.