Abstract:

The measurement of regional development and the clustering of regions are the problem of high importance, especially in the context of EU Regional policy. Properly defined a lagging cluster of regions is the main recipient of the Structural and Cohesion Funds.  Traditional clustering methods fail to rank regions what makes these methods not applicable for the problem of recipients’ determination. In the current measurement practice MCDM methods are considered to be a suitable ranking tool. Meanwhile MCDM methods are not meant to cluster the alternatives considering similarities between all alternatives within the cluster in terms of all criteria. The quasi-clustering can be done, which is based on the consideration of distances to the etalon established by MCDM methods. In this research the stability analysis has been suggested as a tool to validate the number of quasi-clusters, to identify the most stable structure and to define the most suitable MCDM method for the clustering. Two MCDM methods were chosen to measure the regional development, in particular VIKOR and Hellwig’s. By the stability analysis the VIKOR method was defined as the most suitable for clustering. Clustering Stability analysis was applied for the 35 NUTS 2 regions from Visegrad group.