Ranking of Rural Business Environment in Mazandaran Province from the Perspective of Owners of Agricultural Businesses

     Improving business environment is one of the factors affecting on the economic development of rural areas. In this study, 75 questionnaires from the owners of agricultural businesses was used to evaluated and ranked business environment. Factor analysis showed that 5 factors effect on the rural economic activists, which explain 72% of the changes. Among the extracted factors, the first factor with 33.97% of total changes was named as business environment. Based on the components of this factor, the share of each of the measurable items was calculated and according to these shares, the cities of Mazandaran province were ranked. results of TOPSIS method showed that Babol, Sari and Amol cities are in the ranks of the first to third respectively in rural areas. The scores of these three cities are 59.35, 53.68 and 50.68, respectively. The score of each city show that the cities of Mazandaran province are different in terms of business environment index and all of cities are far from the ideal point, so it is necessary to do appropriate actions for Improvement the states of cities of Mazandaran province. The most important priorities for improving the business environment in rural areas are security and social capital, accessing to electricity, roads and markets, respectively.