تحقيقات جغرافيايی (Apr 2018)
Explanation of the Relationship Between Countries’ Access to Sea and Human Development Index
Abstract
Changing nature of the relationship between human and geographical environment has had considerable influence on geographical science school of thought. In terms of "ecological analysis", this relationship is one of the important research fields in geographical sciences. Geographic location is one of the key elements in the environment, which is divided into a number of subgroups. In all traditional and modern theories of geography, geographical location is one of the most important variables in power formulation and political behavior of countries. Maritime location and access to free waters an element of geographical location, and it is a significant variable in global theories of geopolitics and maritime studies. Countries’ access to maritime environment has both constraints and opportunities for countries. The purpose of this study is to explain the relationship between maritime location of countries and their Human Development Index (HDI), as well as comparison of HDI between maritime countries and landlocked countries. This research is basic in terms of its objective, and descriptive-analytic and correlative in terms of its nature and methodology. To expound the relationship between the maritime location of countries and their HDI, countries were ranked based on their maritime locations, and then the relationship between the two variables has been explained. The results of regression analysis show that the correlation coefficient between maritime location index and HDI equals 0.314 (P value 0.000<0.05). The results show a significant relation between the maritime location and human development index, to the extent that maritime location index is increased by 1 unit, the HDI is increased by 0.577 (constant 0.649). Landlocked countries are selected as control group in order to illustrate the effect of access to the sea on HDI. The results of t-test indicate that maritime countries are ranked highly in HDI in comparison with landlocked countries (P value 0.015<0.05). According to the results, it can be suggested that maritime location is one of the factors affecting the development process of countries. But there are other factors which have higher explanatory power than maritime location.
