Integrating rough-entropy and rough-TOPSIS methods for evaluating the legatum prosperity pillars of weakest performing countries

Abstract

Although most countries of the world seek to improve their performance to achieve prosperity for their citizens, the performance of some other countries is still disappointing and has witnessed a deterioration in recent years due to civil wars, poverty, and failure to identify shortcomings and work on them. Many global indexes are concerned with ranking and evaluating the performance of countries, the most prominent of which is the Legatum prosperity index. This study presents a novel tool based on the MCDM approach under uncertainty. Twelve pillars were considered as criteria for evaluating the performance of the 19 poorest-performing countries globally, according to the 2021 Legatum prosperity index. The rough-entropy and rough-TOPSIS methods were used to assess the performance of countries and analyze the pillars of prosperity to determine their shortcomings. Further, a comparison with the 2021 Legatum prosperity index and sensitivity analysis is conducted to validate the obtained results. This study analyses and identifies that South Sudan gets the worst ranking while Cameroon is the best. Likewise, the results indicate that the worst performance pillar was the governance pillar, while the best pillar was the health pillar at the level of the studied countries. The proposed approach is essential for researchers working on performance measurement and ranking, as it ensures the robustness and realism of the results. It also gives a glimpse to the leaders of the countries about the actual situation of their countries to work on addressing the failures. In addition, it makes a significant contribution to the current scientific knowledge by providing a novel tool for evaluating performance indexes.