Explaining the Competitiveness of Border Regions with a Foresight Approach(Case Study: Kurdistan Province)

Problem definition: 

The need for attention has been raised more than before to the border areas and the competitiveness of these areas by entering the age of globalization. The competitiveness of border regions is an effort to eliminate unfavorable social and economic situations and protection and pay attention to the capabilities of these areas as well as the improvement of physical, natural, and artificial capitals.

The present research has been done with the aim of expressing competitiveness in Kurdistan and analysis of possible situations from future competitiveness in the province.

 The type of the current research is applied in terms of purpose and it is exploratory in terms of nature based on the future research method. Data collection has been done in both library and field methods. To express the status of indicators and extraction of key factors and scenarios from forecasting software, Mic Mac, and Scenario Wizard were used. Meta swot software was used to identify the competitiveness strategy. Qualitative data were gathered with an open questionnaire and document review and quantitative data were collected numerically which was used in the first stage from the open questionnaire for general extraction of effective factors on competitiveness. In the second stage, key factors were extracted from the weighting of Delphi questionnaires in MicMac software.

The results indicated that the competitiveness model of Kurdistan is unstable and fragile. In addition, the research coefficient has shown the realization of scenarios with unfavorable situations. The best solution for moving from unfavorable scenarios to favorable situations has been to emphasize indicators with the most success, inimitability, and compatibility with competitiveness.