The Convergence of Social Welfare in the Iranian Provinces Using Spatial STAR Nonlinear Technique

Social welfare is one of the suitable criteria for macroeconomic situation reviewing and policymakers performance evaluating in society. Therefore, social welfare convergence of regions is an important issue. Owing to the increment of social classes’ gap and inequality in society, politicians consider the social welfare convergence of regions to tackle the mentioned problem. To this end, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the convergence of social welfare of Iranian provinces with using spatial STAR nonlinear techniques during 2000-2013. The results indicate that there is a convergence between provinces that they have not spatial effects. In addition, the convergence speed in this group of provinces is equal to 3.1289. Also, the results indicate that there is not a convergence between the provinces that they have the spatial effects.