Study on How the Prevalence of Disability and Its Relationship to the Development of Iran

The purpose of this paper is examining the prevalence of disability at both national and provincial levels and studying the relationship between development and prevalence of disability in 2011. The methodology of this study is library research, in which the existing statistics were gone under a secondary analysis. To do this, the first part of the paper deals with a comprehensive and detailed study of prevalence of disability by gender, age, region and type at national and provincial levels based on the results of the 2011 National Population and Housing Census. In the second part of this paper, 32 economic, health-medical, demographic, cultural-educational and infrastructural indices are combined to form the Development indices based on the TOPSIS method. Then through linear regression, the relationship between prevalence of disability and socio-economic and cultural development in Iran, were studied.The results of regression show that economic development has a significant but negative impact on prevalence of disability. Also the positive impact of health development on prevalence of disability is confirmed. This is due to the fact that access to health and medical services and treatment of patients using intensive and special cares, gives survival chance to larger number of the disabled. At the end, improvement of level of total development index has a negative and significant impact on the prevalence of disability (in Iran).