The Analysis of the Spatial, Educational and Cultural Inequalities in Metropolitan region of Azerbaijan

Regional development is a new planning concept that aims at creating an appropriate framework to achieve a sustainable improvement in living standards for city and village dwellers. Balanced and harmonious development of the region is regarded as a very important prerequisite for achieving economic stability and development of the country. Education and its indexes along with the cultural sector are viewed as two of the most important components of the development which play a central role in development processes. They provide the necessary condition for the development of societies. Therefore, fair and equal distribution of educational and cultural opportunities in a macro scale, as a humanitarian purpose, is often considered an effective indicator in developed societies. Therefore, this study attempted to analyze the inequality between macro-regional and inter-regional metropolitan regions of Azerbaijan in terms of educational and cultural indicators. The research method is descriptive-analytic and it is an applied study. The population consisted of all the major cities in the region before 1391. To measure regional disparities from educational and cultural dimensions, a total of 21 indicators were used. To determine the importance of the indicators, AHP model and to analyze the data VIKOR was used. The results showed that from 47 cities under study, 12 cities had fully desirable conditions, 14 cities had desirable conditions, 11 cities had relatively well conditions, 9 cities had disappointing conditions and 2 cities had extremely disappointing condditions. Moreover, among the provinces in the metropolitan region of Azerbaijan, the greatest inequalities were observed in the Western Azerbaijan with an average VIKOR score of 0.231, and in Ardabil and East Azerbaijan with the average scores of 0.117 and 0.098, respectively.