Identifying Strategic Development Objectives for European Union’s Potential Candidate States Using Dominance-Based Rough Set Approach: Case Study of Bosnia and Herzegovina

Abstract

This research is the second of a series of three researches to cope with strategic development objectives using Dominance-based Rough Set Approach (DRSA). The objective of this article is to expose the results of a research using DRSA to help the European Union (EU) identifying political, economical, sociological and technological strategic objectives for potential candidate countries planning to join the EU. Using the proposed methodology, politicians and leaders will be able to prioritize strategic development objectives according to political, economical, sociological and technological (PEST) needs of a specific candidate country to the EU. More precisely, the proposed methodology classifies all the European Union’s countries according to the following three different categories: [A] EU countries that are doing well according to the selected indicators; [B] EU countries that need support to acquire category A status; [C] EU countries ranked the lowest and needing special support with regard to the criterion or criteria considered. The three categories are delimited by tertiles relative to the average ranking of all EU countries including a potential candidate country, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Afterwards, DRSA provides decision rules based on this classification. These decision rules thus focus on the PEST needs of countries with respect to improve their development and classification by pointing out what was needed to be part of the different categories. We strongly believe that by targeting these identified needs, this research will help the development of the European Union’s economy, target and prioritize economical and sociological improvements with the use of strategic objectives for any candidate country. One of the results concerning our case study with Bosnia and Herzegovina is about the fact that this potential country has a weakness in the percentage of women in politics. Indeed, our research as shown that this criterion has an impact for the overall classification of the EU countries.