analysis of ranking methodologies in development measuring: a case study of khuzestan province counties

today, the knowledge of regions’ strong and weak points and the existing gaps between regions is necessary for better planning and programming to deal with them. using such indexes as economic, sociologic, cultural, sanitary and other indexes which can be good criteria for the position and place determination of these quotients, is the main solving problem factor to achieve economic welfare, sociologic health in assessing stable development. that is the more careful this process is the more effectiveness is expected. thus in this study three methods of numerical taxonomy, factor analysis and fuzzy logic have been used for the identification of khuzestan province counties development ranking in 1379 and in 1386. besides this ranking, comparative analysis of these methods has been done. results show that the development opportunities of many counties in this province in 1386 compared to 1379 have been destroyed. results also indicate that condense variability in numerical taxonomy is less than the two other methods. in fact, this method stands between the two methods in the ranking. perhaps the difference in multiplier is due to standardization which can omit many clustering aspects of criteria. indeed, it seems that fuzzy logic ranking is more reliable.