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Journal of Global Awareness

Journal of Global Awareness

Document Type

Article

Abstract

Scholars have explored the factors responsible for shaping people’s attitudes towards economic inequality. Yet, this research has focused almost exclusively on Western countries. This is an important limitation: only by looking at the different world regions, scholars can fully elucidate the major factors involved. To address this, the paper examines data from the World Value Survey, a database of representative samples drawn from more than one hundred countries. The analyses reveal that people tolerate economic inequalities more when they have higher salary, are better educated, are male, and live in poorer countries. The data also indicate that a country’s level of income inequality has no impact on the attitude towards economic inequality reported by citizens. Altogether, these findings elucidate the general factors shaping people’s views on inequality worldwide, contributing to understand in which conditions people support egalitarian policies.

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