Logistics competitiveness of OECD countries using an improved TODIM method

Abstract

The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) provides a forum where governments can work together to increase the global welfare and to seek solutions to common problems through economic growth, where logistics plays an important role and contributes to financial stability. Evaluation of the logistics competitiveness of countries is a technical decision-making issue involving a variety of criteria. Most importantly, these criteria usually conflict with each other and they often act and react upon one another. As in logistics competitiveness as well as in many decision-making problems, the relationships among criteria are interdependent. Moreover, different dimensions and criteria weights also affect the evaluation results. By considering these situations, in order to handle these criteria interactions, Mahalanobis distance (MD) based TODIM (an acronym in Portuguese for Interactive and Multicriteria Decision Making) method has been developed and it has been applied to evaluate the logistics competitiveness of the OECD countries. Evaluation of the correlation between criteria develops the consideration outcomes (regarding sorting) to a certain degree with the traditional TODIM method.