Sorting of Level 1 Regions According to Competition Power in Unemployment Reduction

Unemployment, defined as a chronic issue of the global economy, causes countries to focus more on policies that will reduce unemployment. Although Turkey has increased her economic performance in last years, she cannot create sufficient employment to reduce unemployment. This result and high unemployment rates show that the developed and implemented policies cannot reach the desired success. Thus, it is necessary to reconsider these policies from a different point of view. The basic condition for creating a strong economy is to increase the competitive power of the economy. On the other hand, regional competitiveness is related to sustainable and relatively higher ability to generate factor income and factor employment. In this context, production factors of the region play an important role in determining competitive power. Unemployment is considered to be one of the obstacles of the regions to increase competitive power. Aim of this study is to sort the Turkey's NUTS Level 1 regions with multiple criteria decision making technique by taking into account the competitiveness factors. Factors determining competitiveness; labor productivity in manufacturing industry, R&D human power, industrial export rate, and number of entrepreneurs were taken as unemployment reducing factors. The results show that the R&D human power and number of entrepreneurs affect the ranking of the regions.