Regional Leading Industry Selection Based on an Extended Fuzzy VIKOR Approach

Introduction

Leading industry, with the characteristics of a broad market prospect, large development scale, high industrial relevance and high technical precision, is the most crucial sector that plays a significant role in regional economic development in a certain period. Regarding as the foundation of national economic development and the core of promoting the steady growth of the regional economy, the leading industry is of great significance on regional strategy achievement (Yaochen & Lijun, 2008). Scientific leading industrial establishment contributes to the regional coordination development with other industrial sectors, can also assist to upgrade transformation of regional industry-structure (Chen & Xiong, 2015; Sifeng et al., 1998). Besides, the leading industry identification and its coordination with other industrial sectors will also play an exemplary role on regional development.

The leading industry identification involves in research area of spatial geography and industrial economics. Under the atmosphere of increasing global economic and supply chain management, the dynamic benchmark and higher requirement make it difficult to establish a leading industry (Yaochen & Lijun, 2008). Due to the characteristics of spatial heterogeneity, the selection criteria of regional leading industry must focus on advantageous industry and characteristic economy. The selection benchmarks of regional leading industry mainly include the Hirschman benchmark, the Rostow benchmark and the Miyohei benchmark (income elasticity coefficient and productivity increase benchmark). Zejing & Huijun (2017), who has studied the leading industry upgrade and reconstruction path of Jiangsu Province from the perspective of industrial upgrading and global value chains, regards that the leading industry is significant source of regional competitiveness improvement as well as industrial value chain upgrading and reconstruction. According to the demand characteristics of different regional industry, academic circle’s benchmarks, theoretical and empirical studies on the choice of leading industry vary from each other, but mostly based on the Hirschman benchmark, the Rostow benchmark and the Miyohei benchmark (Lam et al., 2017; Y.-q. Liu et al., 2006; XIA Qing & Min, 2013; Zhenyuan et al., 2016). However, research methods in literature need to be supported by quantities of industrial data, which means there are certain limitations in the management practice application of the new area of strategic level and the underdeveloped regions of the central and western. In addition, there are rarely environmentally friendly and sustainability requirements in the course of industrial selection in literature. Since the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, the Party Central Committee, with General Secretary Xi Jinping as the core, has repeatedly put forward the requirement that “green water and green mountains are golden mountains and silver mountains”. Therefore, the choice of regional leading industry under new background must take the principle of ecological sustainability into consideration and accomplish “not only need gold and silver mountains, but also green water and green mountains” eventually. Based on the benchmarks and principles of industry, economy, society and environmental sustainability, this paper constructs a comprehensive evaluation index system. In order to deal with fuzzy uncertainty of qualitative indexes, trapezoidal fuzzy number characterization judgment information is introduced, and through the fuzzy extended VIKOR method, the selection of regional leading industry can be achieved.

The reminder of this research is organized as follows. Section 2 presents literature review. In Section 3, the main criteria for selecting the leading industry are collected. Subsequently, an extended fuzzy VIKOR method is developed to determine the regional leading industry. An example is performed to prove the feasibility of the proposed decision-making steps in Section 5, which provides a novel perspective for selecting regional leading industry. Finally, the paper is ended with some conclusions.