Introducing a New Approach to Estimate Welfare Index in Iran: Using Fuzzy Logic Approach

Over the past decades, one of the most important indicators of the development and welfare was economic growth or any quantitative variables such as gross domestic product and income per capita. As long as the World has experienced a wide gap among rich and poor countries, economic growth as the only effective factor in welfare was questioned and consequently, gross domestic product distribution and other issues related to social justice raised as a distinguished feature of welfare and development economics. Estimating welfare trend in Iran can mirror the policies imposed by policymakers. Therefore, this paper aims to estimate welfare index during 1974- 2006 period. In this paper MATLAB software is used to estimate welfare employing fuzzy logic model using Sen's approach. The results of this study show that in spite of high degrees of vacillation, welfare trend was ascending during the aforementioned years. The maximum value obtained was 0.715 in 2005 while the minimum value obtained was 0.421 in 1994. Keywords