Comparing the effects of social welfare on economic growth in Iran and selected developing countries

Social welfare as the development of people's living standards is one of the most important socio-economic categories, which has been explained and analyzed in economic texts, and the provision of welfare of society members by different societies has been discussed among thinkers and experts for a long time. . Although welfare is a concept that is used in all social sciences, but due to the wide scope of this concept, people do not have a single understanding of it and there are confusions about what is meant by welfare. The word "social welfare" is the birth of economic and social developments and relationships of recent centuries and has become the fundamental goal of development programs in different societies until today. A goal without which development in its various dimensions (human, social, cultural, political and economic) will fail. On the other hand, according to a 10-year research conducted by the United Nations University's Global Development Economics Research Institute (unitar), most countries that have succeeded in reducing poverty and increasing access to public goods have based this progress on strong economic growth. According to Fitzpatrick, prosperity is not the goal of development, but development itself, that is, we can consider a government and a society as developed that provides the minimum or appropriate level of life from various economic, educational, health and medical dimensions for each individual and its residents. provided When developing societies cannot have a suitable level of economic growth, one of the ways out of this situation is to increase and improve the level of social welfare. Social welfare is one of the most important and attention-grabbing issues in today's world. Development and movement towards development is one of the basic issues of different societies in the world, and underdeveloped societies are trapped in the so-called vicious circle of poverty due to the lack of per capita income and countless other factors. Accordingly, one of the most important goals of economic planners is to increase social welfare in order to expand economic growth. Therefore, the present research aims to evaluate the effects of social welfare on economic growth in Iran and selected developing countries in the period of 2002-2021 using the Generalized Method of Moments. The results of the study indicate that social welfare has a very high impact on economic growth. Also, the effectiveness of the government and political stability increase economic growth.