Ranking Regional Digitalization in Türkiye (2019–2024): An Entropy-TOPSIS Analysis of Household Technology Access

The study employs an integrated Entropy-TOPSIS model to evaluate and rank the digital access readiness of the households of the 12 statistical regions of Türkiye, between 2019 and 2024. A Global Decision Matrix (72 × 5) was created to have all the composite scores on the same scale, and Entropy weights and TOPSIS ideal solutions were calculated once from the unified matrix, to achieve longitudinal comparability. The results show that Western Anatolia and Istanbul have always been among the top regions in the nation, and in 2020, 2022 and 2023, Western Anatolia overtook Istanbul in the ranking. The lowest scores are consistently observed in Northeastern Anatolia, Central Eastern Anatolia and Southeastern Anatolia in all years. The low discrimination power of the mobile phone penetration and internet access is shown by the entropy weights, which show that these have a near homogeneous distribution, resulting in no significant regional differences. The majority of the score variance is attributable to the usage of desktop computers, laptops and tablets, and this reaffirms the fact that the digital divide in Türkiye has gone beyond basic internet connectivity and is now also a matter of ownership of digital devices at home. The SD tracks plotted longitudinally shows a non-linear, cyclical pattern. However, the pandemic did not cause uniform growth but was expected to magnify the regional inequality in the first few years, followed by temporary convergence in 2021–2022. These gains were then undone by high inflation, leading to higher inequality in 2023 with a delay in hardware spending by eastern households. Ranking robustness is confirmed by the results of sensitivity analyses such as equal-weight simulation, leave-one-out criterion removal, SAW and VIKOR comparison, as well as Variance Inflation Factors checks. Regional inequality, measured by the standard deviation of composite scores, ranged from σ=0.2095 in 2019 to a peak of σ=0.2495 in 2023, with the highest-scoring region (CC=0.924, Istanbul, 2021) scoring nearly 90 times higher than the lowest (CC=0.010, Central Eastern Anatolia, 2023). The study provides the first hardware-access ranking, which is comparable across the statistical regions in Türkiye and which has been carried out over a long period of time, and reveals that the regional policy must shift from expanding broadband to providing targeted incentives for acquiring hardware in structurally disadvantaged eastern regions.