Strategizing for Better Life Development Using OECD Well-being Indicators in a Hybrid Fuzzy MCDM Model

Abstract

Because gross domestic product is a deficient measure of well-being, designing well-being indicators has become a new international trend for informing government policies to better citizens’ lives. To facilitate achieving this goal, governments must establish sustainable, sufficient material living conditions and quality of life and attempt to understand citizens’ real needs. Given that analyzing well-being involves imprecise information, a fuzzy multiple criteria decision-making (MCDM) model is conducive to addressing the complex interrelationships among all indicators. Therefore, this paper proposes a hybrid fuzzy MCDM model that could facilitate strategizing for better life development. With aspiration levels based on the well-being indicators of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the proposed model combines the fuzzy DEMATEL technique, fuzzy DEMATEL-based analytic network process, and modified fuzzy VIKOR methods to process the interrelationships among all indicators and select the most pressing factors requiring improvement and development. A case study was used to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed fuzzy model. The empirical results attested that the proposed fuzzy model is superior to the traditional fuzzy model, identifying that for Taiwan, the “air pollution” criterion in the “environment” dimension is the most pressing issue to be addressed.