Assessing and forecasting method of financial efficiency in a free industrial economic zone

Abstract

Industrial free zones are key to the economic progress of developing countries, making the evaluation and forecast of efficiency in these organisations relevant. This research proposes a three-phase method to evaluate and forecast the financial efficiency of the business profiles of companies belonging to the free economic zone of Cartagena - Colombia. The first phase consisted of a cluster analysis to determine representative groups among the companies analysed. In the second phase, financial efficiency is measured for each of the clusters found in phase 1. Finally, in phase 3 a machine learning model is trained and validated to predict the belonging of a company to a category of financial efficiency - cluster. The results show the creation of two business clusters, with an average efficiency of 49.8% and 14.6% respectively. The random forest model has an accuracy of 95% in the validation phase. Copyright © 2021 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.