Longitudinal Analysis of Social Welfare Situation in Iran (1967–2010)

Abstract

The last few decades have seen increased theoretical and empirical interest in multidimensional measures of social welfare. The objective of this paper is to introduce social welfare index (SWI) and its trend for Iran. In this mix method study, Delphi technique was conducted to evaluate expert opinion on choice of priority social welfare indicators (study variables) for Iran in 2013. Then, we have used OECD methodology of constructing composite indicators to develop SWI. SWI as well as its trend have been measured for 1967–2010 (sample size = 44 years). Data were obtained from the Central Bank of Iran, Statistical Center of Iran, and Social Security Organization of Iran. Data were analyzed using SPSS software ver. 20 and exploratory factor analysis, Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin (KMO), and Bartlett test. Based on KMO (0.710), data was adequate for underlying analysis and result of Bartlett’s test of sphericity (757.75, df = 45, p < 0.001) imply that correlation matrix of variables was not an identity matrix. Furthermore, the first two factors explained 77.58 % of total variances, together. The results showed that SWI generally has been increasing during the study period. Furthermore, the best and worst performances were devoted to 1971 and 1988, respectively. Due to having more and diverse dimensions and indicators, SWI can help as a more realistic measure of social welfare.