Studying the Economic Causes of Marginalization Using Treatment Effect (Case Study: Isfahan City)

Chaotic and disorganized development of the cities with a fast and unplanned process can lead to urban marginalization. This is one of the problems of urbanism in the third world countries. So this paper is trying to explore economic causes of marginalization in Isfahan, using four indicators and their welfare effects on the households. For this purpose, different regions of the city are divided into two groups: marginalized & other. Then four economic indicators of unemployment rate, illiteracy rate, land prices and migration rate are included as variables in treatment effects model. For studying welfare effects, 9 sub-indexes are used with different weights. Finally models are estimated by raw data of census questionnaires in 1390. According to the results, land prices and unemployment rate are negatively related with marginalization, and illiteracy rate and migration have a positive relationship with marginalization. For estimating the marginalized group's treatment effects model, this group is considered as the treatment and the non-marginalized is considered as the control group. Welfare is considered as the outcome variable in the model. According to the results, migration rate, illiteracy rate and marginalization have a reverse relationship with welfare whereas the price of land and unemployment rate is directly related to it.