An Imprecise Multiple Criteria Decision Model for Gulf’s Foreign Direct Investment in the North African Countries

Abstract

Foreign direct investment (FDI) is a multiple criteria decision problem where the level of transparency, the rule of law, the governance, the corruption and the financial freedom are among the important criteria to consider before such a decision is made. Usually, the country performance on these criteria is calculated based on historical data and indexes provided by international institutions. Due to the continuous changes in economic trends, the volatile data could not be sufficient to make an optimal investment decision and thus experts’ assertions are essential. In this paper, we propose a multiple criteria decision making methodology to build a ranking on the attractiveness of the Northern African countries (Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco and Mauritania) for foreign direct investment from the Gulf Cooperation Council countries. The proposed approach is a novelty extended version of the ELECTRE IV where expert’s judgment on the investment environment is based on an imprecise Likert scale which allows us to consider partial information on expert’s opinion.

Keywords:

• Foreign Direct Investment
• Multiple Criteria Decision Making
• ELECTRE IV
• Nonlinear Programming

Acknowledgment

The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions to improve the quality of the paper. They are also grateful to Dr. Hasan Murshed and Mr. Sami Zaguia who assisted in the proof-reading of the paper.