Regional Disparities Analysis and Development Foresight (Case Study: East Azerbaijan Province)

Accelerated urbanization in developing countries and concentration of activities and population in some regions leads to regional imbalances. This is one of the important characteristics of the third world countries. This character is affected by pole growth policies that have led to the concentration of facilities in one or more several regions.In this case, regional planning science has beneficial patterns to resolve problems. First step is identification of socio-economic disparities in regions. However, this article tries to survey development disparities in East Azerbaijan Province. In this survey 44 indicators were selected for comparison of counties, and numeric taxonomic and cluster analysis methods were used to ranking of regions.Finally this article presents priority of counties to invest in order to achieve social justice. According to the results west area of the Province is prosperous and east area has low degree of development. In the other hand, 8 counties out of 9 counties in west area are in first and second levels of development and in these levels only one county (Sarab) is located in east area. In third and fourth levels of development we can see only Malekan in east area of the Province.