Fuzzy-AHP application in analyzing the factors affecting quality of rural labor

Abstract

This paper aims to investigate the factors affecting the quality of rural labor in Vietnam, a case study in Thai Nguyen province. For this purpose, we establish an integrated framework of factors affecting the quality of rural labor. We use Fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (Fuzzy-AHP) to assess the weight of the criteria and sub-criteria of rural labor quality. This method introduced by Saaty (1987) is a useful tool to cope with the complexity of decision-making. The Fuzzy-AHP is one of the most common Multi-Criteria Decision-Making instruments for dealing with quantifiable and intangible criteria, which reflect the relative importance of the alternatives based on constructing a pairwise comparison matrix. The results show that the four most weighted factors are institutions, local government policies, technical qualifications, and mentality. In particular, the weight of the institution is the largest (0.2343), meaning that this factor is the most important one affecting the quality of rural labor in Thai Nguyen province. The weight of local government policy is close to that of institution, about 0.2259. The weights of technical qualification and mentality are 0.1238 and 0.1135, respectively. In addition, age and education levels do not significantly affect the rural labor quality of Thai Nguyen province.