A tolerance approach for unbalanced economic development policy-making in a fuzzy environment

In general, developing countries lack capital and human resources to develop all industrial sectors of their countries. Therefore, they will select some of the industrial sectors concerned and invest all the money to those sectors to make unbalanced economic progress. In making economic policies, they have to use imprecise [fuzzy] information to consider many development goals. This paper applies a fuzzy goal programming approach for the optimal planning of an unbalanced development policy for developing (or underdeveloped) countries. In particular, it presents how fuzzy objectives of economic planners can be quantified through the use of specific tolerance operators in various economic growth alternatives. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved.