Quarterly Journal of Economics
Fairness Across the World
2026-09-06
This paper provides the first comprehensive global evidence on people’s fairness and efficiency preferences, beliefs about the sources of inequality and the efficiency cost of redistribution, and policy attitudes toward redistribution. Using a globally harmonized consequential experiment with more than 65,000 individuals across 60 countries, we show that the source of inequality plays a substantially larger role for inequality acceptance than the efficiency cost of redistribution. At the global level, implemented inequality increases by 85 percent when inequality is caused by merit rather than luck, compared to a 14 percent increase when redistribution entails a 50 percent efficiency cost. We document substantial heterogeneity in fairness views and beliefs both within and across societies. The meritocratic fairness view is most prominent in many richer Western societies, while libertarian and egalitarian fairness views are widespread in many other parts of the world. Globally, people are more likely to believe that inequality reflects luck rather than merit, while beliefs in large efficiency costs of redistribution are relatively weak. Fairness preferences and beliefs are strongly associated with redistribution attitudes and actual redistribution through taxes and transfers across countries. Our findings illustrate how the interaction between fairness views and beliefs may shape redistribution across societies, highlighting the importance of jointly understanding preferences and beliefs in the political economy of redistribution.