Identifying Strategic Development Objectives for European Union’s Potential Candidate States Using Dominance-Based Rough Set Approach: Case Study of Bosnia and Herzegovina

This research is the second of a series of three researches to cope with strategic development objectives using Dominance-based Rough Set Approach (DRSA). The objective of this article is to expose the results of a research using DRSA to help the European Union (EU) identifying political, economical, sociological and technological strategic objectives for potential candidate countries planning to join the EU. Using the proposed methodology, politicians and leaders will be able to prioritize strategic development objectives according to political, economical, sociological and technological (PEST) needs of a specific candidate country to the EU. More precisely, the proposed methodology classifies all the European Union’s countries according to the following three different categories: [A] EU countries that are doing well according to the selected indicators; [B] EU countries that need support to acquire category A status; [C] EU countries ranked the lowest and needing special support with regard to the criterion or criteria considered. The three categories are delimited by tertiles relative to the average ranking of all EU countries including a potential candidate country, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Afterwards, DRSA provides decision rules based on this classification. These decision rules thus focus on the PEST needs of countries with respect to improve their development and classification by pointing out what was needed to be part of the different categories. We strongly believe that by targeting these identified needs, this research will help the development of the European Union’s economy, target and prioritize economical and sociological improvements with the use of strategic objectives for any candidate country. One of the results concerning our case study with Bosnia and Herzegovina is about the fact that this potential country has a weakness in the percentage of women in politics. Indeed, How to cite this paper: Trudel, B., Marin, J.-C. and Zaras, K. (2018) Identifying Strategic Development Objectives for European Union’s Potential Candidate States Using Dominance-Based Rough Set Approach: Case Study of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Modern Economy, 9, 1452-1464. https://doi.org/10.4236/me.2018.98092 Received: July 23, 2018 Accepted: August 24, 2018 Published: August 27, 2018 Copyright © 2018 by authors and Scientific Research Publishing Inc. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution International License (CC BY 4.0). http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Open Access


Introduction
This is the second research of a series of three articles using a systematic approach using a combination of statistics and DRSA to help specific territories identifying strategic objectives to improve their development. The first article dealt with all the African countries. This second article uses the same methodology to determine strategic objectives for potential candidate countries for the European Union with the case of Bosnia-Herzegovina. The third article will help identify poverty for all the United Nations countries and strategic objectives for sustainable development.
The systematic approach begins with a selection of statistical data taken from different census, the World Bank and various indexes. These variables were separate over four different perspectives (Political, Economical, Sociological and Technological). The ranking of all the selected country according to these perspectives could then be performed with the weighted average. The final step is the use of DRSA to identify decision rules and conditions for each country. These conditions represent strategic objectives in order to improve the country development compared to others. This research deals with all the countries of the European Union and we included a potential candidate (Bosnia-Herzegovina). Therefore, the systematic approach will categorize Bosnia-Herzegovina within the European Union and determine decision rules in order to improve its development thru the identified conditions which should be considered as its own strategic objectives.

Literature Review
The European Union is a union of states where public policies are discussed in order to solve sociological and economical problems that member states, if were alone, would have difficulties facing them [1]. The European Council of Bruxelles of 2006 came with the notion that the addition of new states must take into account the capacity, of the EU, to integrate new members [2]. When in the process of joining the EU, several political, sociological, economical, legal and cultural issues are studied and discussed between the members of the EU and the candidate state [3]. Afterwards, the candidate state must develop its national strategy. Slovenia is an excellent example of this process. In June 2005, the Firstly proposed by Pawlak [5] [6] and by Pawlak and Slowinski [7], the Rough set theory is a mathematical tool with the aim of supporting decision-making processes. Since its development, it's been used in many fields such as medecine, banking, engineering, learning, location selection, pharmacology, finance, market analysis and economics [8]- [17]. The approach was then broadened by Greco, Matarazo and Slowinski [9] and renamed the "Dominance-based Rough Set Approach" (DRSA). Then, Zaras enlarged it for mixed data (deterministic, probabilistic and fuzzy) [10].

The Dominance-Based Rough Set Approach (DRSA) Applied to Determine the Strategic Developmental Objectives of Bosnia and Herzegovina
In order to determine the strategic objectives of Bosnia and Herzegovina for improving its overall classification, the methodology of the Dominance-based

Formulation of the Multi-Criteria Problems
Our first task was to get the overall ranking of the 29 countries on the basis of  E is the set of evaluations measured by indicators e ik with respect to criterion X k or indicators e ikj with respect to criterion X kj for each perspective j.
The weighted average rank method was used to obtain the ranking of countries. Thus, countries were ranked from the most to the least preferable in regards of each indicator in relation to each criterion. Afterword, since weights of indicators are considered equal, we calculated the weighted average rank for each country. This enables us to obtain the ranking of the countries with respect to a given perspective as well for the overall classification.
For each perspective j, the weighted average of country i, The overall weighted average of country i, where: w k is the weight of criterion k and w kj for perspective j; r ki is a rank of country i with respect to criterion k and r kij for perspective j.
With the classifications of 29 countries, overall and for each perspective, the following step is to group them into three categories A, B and C. Table 2 presents these classifications of the 29 European Union countries according to the four perspectives as well for the overall one presented in first column.
The analysis of a country position by his decision makers, Bosnia and Herzegovina in our case, would certainly lead them to take actions in order to improve its rank and furthermore, to improve its chance to join the EU.

Geographical Analysis of the Overall Classification Decision
Regarding the overall classification in Table 2, we can notice that most countries categorized in C are geographically located in the South-East region of the European Union. A map of the EU showing that fact is presented in Appendix A.
As it was the case in the first article about Africa [21], we still have the same phenomenon that we named the "Poverty String", since all the countries in the C category are all connected to one another.

The Decision Rules
To get the decision rules we used the 4eMka2 software [22], which was developed by the Intelligent Decision Support Systems laboratory (IDSS) at the computing science institute of the Poznan University of Technology. Rules for all the various perspectives combined are presented below in Table 3. Since we wanted to get the most significant combination, we only kept rules with a minimal relative strength of 20% and those that were limited to 4 conditional criteria. Following the same analysis, we can tie strategies for each of the four PEST perspectives. Table 4 describes the rules for each of the four PEST perspectives.

Strategic Decision-Making
This section demonstrates the practical application of the decision rules for Bosnia and Herzegovina and the usefulness of these rules for sustainable political, economical, sociological and technological development of the selected country,   Bosnia Herzegovina is classified as C for the overall classification (see Table   2). In order to improve the country status compared to all other members of the

Conclusions
This research has been demonstrated that the DRSA can be used to identify the political, economic, sociological and technological indicators that are relevant for strategic decision making. It has been shown, by the example of Bosnia-Herzegovina, that our approach can be useful in considering of the country's candidacy to join the European Union.
We acknowledge the complexity and hard work of annexing a new country to the EU, providing a country with specific strategic objectives and comparing itself to other EU country helps to better understand specific challenges to be addressed or combined with other processes.
Furthermore, when other data from future years will be available, this tool will have a strategic importance for the European Union decision makers to study tendencies, changes in political, economical, sociological and technological development. The decision makers will also probably note the changes in classification over time and make predictions. It will also enable any candidate countries to enlighten their significant weaknesses in order to improve them and finally, that means an overall improvement of their situation in regards of different perspectives. Also, most countries classified as C seem to be connected to one another in the South-East region of Europe. That being said, a particular attention should be given to other possible candidates from this part of Europe if they had to knock at EU door.

Limits and Future Research
As it was the case with the first article, this research is limited to the selected in-dicators. Which means that indicators related to culture, religion and the environment, to name a few were not considered. Thus, it would be interesting to introduce some of these variables in a future research using the proposed methodology.
Furthermore, several strategic objectives and targets for Bosnia Herzegovina were identified. For future researchers we suggest that all candidate countries to the European Union use the same methodology to identify their respective classification within the European Union, as well for their own strategic objectives.
Decision makers, politicians and leaders could also propose researching for other specific political, economic, sociological and technological indicators to be studied. Finally, European Union leaders could target development projects, estimate and eventually measure the impact of these projects on the proposed indicators and better manage the allocated resources to the development of new candidates within the European Union.
We strongly believe that the methodology proposed in this research may be tested at a larger scale for all the countries of the United Nations, which is the subject of the third and last article using the proposed methodology to identify strategic development objectives.