Disparities in distribution of services among provinces in Iran have turned into an extremely sensitive issue, which has attracted the attention of researchers and planners in recent years. This inequality in socio- economic development process of provinces, in general, and unequal distribution of agricultural extension services among provinces in particular, is visible and the country is characterized by intra- provincial disparities in terms of extension services enjoyment. Thus the main objective of the present study is to determine some important indicators of agricultural extension services and apply them in an analysis of the provincial distribution of agricultural extension services in Iran as well as to determine the level of provincial enjoyment in this respect. To achieve this objective, the study was carried out in two phases. In the first phase, through review of available literature, 33 agricultural extension indicators were identified and evaluated by 75 experts in agricultural extension, selected randomly out of five different provinces. Out of those indicators only 30 were found appropriate for assessing the level of enjoyment of provinces from agricultural extension services. In the second phase, based on the indicators determined in the first phase, the required data from 28 provinces were collected. But at this stage only 24 extension indicators, (11 indicators of human resources and 13 indicators of physical facilities) were made available, and practically the data for the 6 indicators of financial resources in agricultural extension were not accessible. Therefore the analysis was carried out based on 24 indicators. For calculating composite indices of provinces and to determine the level of enjoyment of provinces from agricultural extension services, the indicators were made scale free by using the method of division by mean. Principal component method was employed to calculate the composite indices of human potentials as well as physical facilities of agricultural extension in provinces. The results revealed that from the viewpoint of extension services enjoyment, wide gaps exist among provinces. It was also shown that, human and physical extension services have not been distributed based on the needs and potentials of agricultural sector in different provinces.
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