Spatial Patterns of Poverty in Iran

Poverty can have spatial dimensions. While general figures might show the spatial pattern of poverty, there is a need for more detailed examination of this pattern. Relying on simple figures of spatial patterns and ranking regions based on them might be misleading. This paper tries to apply spatial analysis methodsm, namely spatial autoregressive models to find out the impacts of space on the human poverty index (HPI). The results suggest that there is a significant spatial relationship between the HPI in the Iranian provinces. This means that the location of the provinces has some contributions to the differences of HPI in the country. However, the results show that space can partially explain the variations in poverty.