Application of TOPSIS Model with Entropy Weights for Sustainability Assessment at Prefecture-Level Cities in China

Hasnat Dewan and Bo Li

Sustainable development is a multidimensional concept. Many different sets of sustainability indicators including some composite indices have been developed over the years to assess progress to sustainable development in a place. None of the indices has universal acceptance. This paper at tempts to evaluate progress toward sustainable development at 242 representat ive prefecture-level cities in China using a multi-criteria decision making method, TOPSIS, with entropy weights. One of the advantages of TOPSIS method is that it uses cost benefit approach with importance weights of the indices. In order to construct the sustainability evaluation index system, we use 46 indices under 11 criteria that belong to 3 subsystems – economic, social, and resource and environmental. The results show that the Spearman rank-correlation coefficient between the sustainability ranking of cities based on TOPSIS model and the ranking of cities based on per capita GDP is only 0.43, while that between sustainability ranking and GDP ranking is 0.81 with a rank difference as high as 230. Another finding of this study is that resource-based cities top the list based on per capita GDP ranking, but they don’t do as well in sustainability ranking based on TOPSIS model with entropy weights.

DOI : https://doi.org/10.21102/jbpr.2018.07.131.01