Applied Economics Lunch Seminar

Du 19/10/2021 de 12:30 à 13:30

Salle R2.01, Campus Jourdan

MO Zhexun ()

Determinants of Redistributive Preferences in Contemporary China: Evidence from an Online Experiment

Previous research suggests that Chinese citizens hold a set of seemingly contradictory beliefs: they are tolerant of large income inequalities and regard the rich to be deserving, but also demand strong government intervention to reduce the income gap. We conducted a pilot online experiment, with a representative sample of 2,500 adult individuals in mainland China in September 2021, in order to better understand the sources of such preference combinations. Preliminary results suggest that on the whole, Chinese citizens exhibit rather strong support for real-stake inequality-reducing policies, as well as the government's duty to regulate income distribution. However, surprisingly, priming the “luck component” of the income generating process in either becoming rich or staying poor makes them significantly less supportive of redistributive policies specifically targeted at taxing the rich, and also less supportive of government duties in regulating the income gap. This effect is mainly driven by a part of the population who self-reported to have relatively low economic pressure. We conjecture that such “libertarian” fairness views, as well as the strong demand for government intervention to “redistribute”, could both originate from extreme poverty aversion / wealth aspiration. On the one hand, poverty aversion drives a desire for property ownership, thus making it more likely to justify any means in acquiring property; on the other hand, poverty aversion also calls for strong government intervention in lifting the poor up. We argue that such a mechanism could be most saliently exemplified in the Chinese economic regime with highly sustained growth rates as well as high social mobility over the past four decades.