Ranking 31 provinces of Iran based on infrastructure growth using Shannon entropy and TOPSIS methods

One of the most important economic goals of countries is to create the necessary conditions for increasing economic growth. One of the necessary conditions for that is investment in economic infrastructure. The purpose of this research is to examine the weight of indicators and rank 31 provinces of Iran based on the growth of infrastructure. The type of current research is applied in terms of purpose and descriptive-post-event in terms of method. The statistical population of our research is 31 provinces of Iran and the time frame under our investigation is 10 years, from 2011 to 2020. In this research, we will examine the growth of the investigated infrastructures (transportation, healthcare, communication and telecommunications, and water and sewage), then rank the growth of the infrastructures using the Shannon entropy and TOPSIS methods. The results showed that during the 10-year period under investigation, the average growth rate of the infrastructures did not have a regular pattern of increase or decrease, and in some years the infrastructures had growth, and in other years there was no or very slight growth. Regarding the geometric mean, the total growth rate of the investigated infrastructures was 14.81% in the 10-year period.