Measuring the Relative Efficiency of the Cities of East Azarbaijan Province in Tourism Infrastructures Part by Using Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA)

With the start of the 21th century, due to the existence of economical, health, security and communication infrastructures , tourism has become one of the world's top three industries. The aim of this study was to evaluate the relative efficiency of the cities of East Azarbaijan province in terms of tourism infrastructure. Current research is an applied research and data collection and analytic-descriptive methods was considered in current study. The required information were collected through library and documentary. Geographic area of research will constitute 19 cities of East Azarbaijan province. Shannon entropy models, data envelopment analysis (DEA), Matrix crossover performance and Dea slover software were used to evaluate the data. The results showed that among the cities of East Azarbaijan province, in terms of tourism infrastructures, the cities of Tabriz, Maragheh, and miyaneh with the highest performance, 0.824, 0.865 and 0.919 respectively have the first to third place and Hashtrud, Varzeghan and Charvaymaq cities with the performance rate of 0.597, 0.544 and 0.471, take place at the seventeenth to nineteenth position. Also at the provincial level in terms of distribution of tourism infrastructure there is imbalance between the cities , so that 0.29 are efficient 0.38 are semi-efficient and 0.33 are inefficient. The main reason for the inefficiency of the cities raised from high use of inputs for small production of outputs. In general, the main solution to eliminate the inequalities and upgrade of inefficient regions to an efficient border is following up the principles of social justice in all aspects and considering the efficient cities as the pattern and model in terms of tourism infrastructure in order to make the decisions in line with the integrated development of different regions of the province.