Towards competitive regional development through clusters: approaches to their performance evaluation

Abstract

It is notable that the interest in clusters and their role in sustainable regional development are increasing as scholars often review this topic. Valuable observations are made on how the clusters should be researched in order to improve their performance which would result in economic growth both on regional and national scale. Clusters’ performance is complicated to evaluate as the measures of the aspects that must be calculated differ and the most appropriate solution to formalize these aspects should be found. Different multi-criteria evaluation methods are suggested by scholars for a quantitative evaluation of performance of a certain phenomenon. This study attempts to present the clusters’ performance evaluation by applying the multi-criteria SAW method. Seven clusters from Lithuania and Latvia were examined to serve the purpose of this study. The multi-criteria analysis could be used as a method in further evaluation of clusters’ performance for it is comprehensible, easy to apply, helpful in the data evaluation of different measures and it provides adequate results, which is very important in a quantitative analysis. The results suggest that processes are very important in clusters’ performance evaluation for clusters which show good results with processes, stay in high positions, whereas clusters which are keeping behind with processes show worse results in their performance. The study still needs to be supplemented by more clusters to obtain specific information and to elaborate on more specific clusters’ performance evaluation methods.