FUZZY LINGUISTIC MODELING OF EASE OF DOING BUSINESS INDICATORS

Ease of Doing Business (EDB) indicators are essential to overall understanding and evaluation of national business environment, and strategy formulation for business policy and regulations. The World Bank does an annual study of these indicators for over 170 nations, but there are many complications and uncertainties involved in the work. This paper proposes a new systematic approach that employs fuzzy set theory to generate composite EDB indicators for ranking and classification problems. We implemented this approach and illustrate its steps and procedures. A case study example for Canada is also presented in which EDB indicators are evaluated, linguistically identified, and ranked. This approach demonstrates the ease of using this fuzzy application, and its potential benefits for future research. We also compare ranking results, obtained from our proposed approach, with the World Bank's results.