Volume 17, Issue 66 (10-2017)                   refahj 2017, 17(66): 185-221 | Back to browse issues page

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Abstract:   (4126 Views)
Introduction: In economics, politics and planning literature, many reasons are mentioned for accentuating the necessity and importance of public sector and planning: compensating for external effects, provision of public goods, reducing transaction costs, etc. However, if we wanted to name one core final goal for public sector and planning, that would be the increase in people’s quality of life. That is the reason why there has been so much attention to the concept of quality of life since 1970s in different fields form medical sciences to economics and urban planning. On the other hand, one of the topics often discussed when taking into account the difference in the level of development of countries in the world, is the concept of governance. Due to  the influential and important role of these two concepts (quality of life and governance), and the influence of national conditions  on local conditions, this article tries to study the relationship between these two concepts.
Method: The data used for achieving the study’s objective, via secondary qualitative analysis, were extracted from 1) Numbeo database on “Quality of Life in cities” throughout the world (150 cities) and 2) “World Governance Indicators” which is one of the publications of the World Bank Institute and includes six indicators of “control of corruption”, “government effectiveness”, “regulatory quality”, “political stability and lack of violence/terror” and “possibility of protest and accountability” for evaluation of governance quality of countries (72 countries).For measuring the relation Stepwise regression analysis was applied using cross-sectional data (2015). To resolve the multiple linearity problem between independent variables” collinear variables elimination” and “variable integration” were used. The method of eliminating the correlated variables led to the elimination of three variables: corruption control, government effectiveness and regulatory quality, and regression analysis was performed using the remaining three variables.
Findings: Stepwise  regression analysis , after eliminating the variables, showed that only rule of law variable had a significant influence on urban quality of life in the world, by explaining 67.8% of its variance. Aggregation  of six world governance indicators  resulted to just one predicting variable, which was named “governance quality”, and can explain 68.1% of the variance of urban quality of life. In fact, the results of the study showed a significant and positive effect of the quality of national governance on the quality of urban life and pointed out that one of the influential factors on quality of urban life is the quality of national governance.
Discussion:from the results of the study it can be concluded that if decision makers and officials in national or local roles would like to improve the quality of life of citizens, they should increase the quality of the governance in countries and cities. Among the variables of the governance, the variable which showed the most correlation with urban quality life was the rule of law. Since legal mechanisms in Iran, is mostly defined in national contexts, this result is another testament for the importance of decisions and the structure of handling the national affairs on urban quality of life.
The results affirmed that national governance quality has a positive and significant relation to urban quality of life and showed that one of important and influential factors in urban quality of life is national governance quality. It also showed that rule of law is the most influential governance variable on urban quality of life, which can explain about two-thirds of its variance. Therefore, it can be inferred that for decision makers and officials in national or local roles to increase urban quality of life, one appropriate way to do that is by increasing the national (and also urban) quality of governance as a whole. However, if there were a lack of resources and possibilities to increase governance as a whole, the one governance quality that can have the most influence on urban quality of life would be the rule of law. So devising policies, strategies and activities that increase rule of law in any country, can lead to an increase in urban quality of life. Since legal mechanisms in Iran, is mostly defined in national contexts, this result is another testament for the importance of national circumstances on urban quality of life.
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Type of Study: orginal |
Received: 2018/02/14 | Accepted: 2018/02/14 | Published: 2018/02/14

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