A model to assess the development priorities of local administrations through the hierarchy of strategic factors

Abstract

Modeling is a process that allows to present and analyze the economic realities together with their quantitative description, extending to the key development factors, their mutual relationships and assessment of their relevance. The essence of the assessment process is the quantification which means expressing the relevance of specific factors in numeric terms. This approach results in creating a model that enables the proper stimulation of development and is used to conceive effective solutions which form a unified framework for development planning and budgeting. The aim of the study is to construct the development model and to assess development priorities for the Local Administrative Unit (LAU). There is no standard model used to assess the process of development of local administrative units. The fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (FAHP) (Chang, 1996) based on expert opinions was used to solve this problem. The essence of this process is to build a hierarchy structure for the problem considered. The hierarchy consists of the main goal, the sub-goals and the tasks. At each hierarchy level, the importance of strategic factors is pairwise compared by experts. Experts’ opinions are the basis for the assessment of each strategic factor. The research was based on data from a survey among the councilors of the urban and rural municipality of Stęszew in the Wielkopolska Voivodeship in Poland in 2017. The proposed approach to the construction of the model and the assessment of strategic factors for administrative units is a universal tool for local and regional development planning.