Application of AHP method in cities' certification process

Due to the global phenomenon of competitiveness, which is also present among the cities and municipalities, there is a need to evaluate the cities' strength and potential, or to estimate their value. Aswell as in case of enterprises, the value of cities and municipalities has to be expressed in certain numbers, since this enables their benchmarking, over the time and with competitors. One of the most popular methodologies for evaluating the competitiveness of cities and municipalities is the one introduced by NALED. It includes twelve criteria that cities and municipalities have to satisfy in certain percentage (at least 75%). However, the practice has shown that the successfulness of so far certified cities and municipalities in Serbia is not the same (measured by the sum of attracted direct investments). Therefore the need for the identification of the importance of certification criteria has appeared. The aim of this paper is to check whether all criteria are equally important and to point out the most important criteria for efficiently attracting direct investments. The AHP method is used to determine the weights in the multi-criteria model and the results have shown that NALED's methodology can be and should be improved