A social work study on measuring the impact of government subsidies reform on economy

Abstract

Government subsidies have been a major concern in many developing countries and they could create major problems such as increase in smuggling, lack of interest in investment, etc. During the past couple of years, the government of Iran decided to eliminate subsidies in different goods such as energy prices and food. In this paper, we present a survey to measure the impacts of such deregulation on Iranian economic factors including inflation, unemployment, tuition fee, consumer consumption pattern and city transportation facilities. The survey distributes a questionnaire among 51 university students aged 20 to 26 in Likert scale. We have used Pearson correlation test to study the relationship between deregulation on government subsidies and other mentioned factors. The results of the survey indicate that there is a meaningful relationship between government subsidies and unemployment, transportation facilities, consumer consumption pattern. However, the survey does not find sufficient evidence to believe that there is any relationship between government subsidies and inflation, increase in tuition fee.

Keywords

• Government subsidies
• Economic reform
• Unemployment
• Inflation