The results of the regressions also suggest that, holding all other variables constant, older people tend to respond more often that income distribution is very unfair, although the relationship between age and unfairness perception is not linear. This result is similar to that of Bellemare et al. (2008), who find that young individuals have lower aversion to inequity than other groups in an experimental setting.

On average, males are just as likely as females to perceive income distribution as very unfair, while married individuals are less likely to do so. Education seems to be correlated with perceptions of unfairness but only at the highest level of education—for those who have completed primary and secondary school, the coefficients are not statistically different from zero. Being part of the labor force does not seem to be correlated with perceptions of unfairness, but being unemployed does. On average, the unemployed population is more likely to perceive income distribution as unfair. The dummy variables for access to basic services and asset ownership have negative signs. In household surveys, these variables tend to be correlated with household income—although the correlations tend to be low— so a possible interpretation is that relatively richer people (as measured by access to services and assets), are less likely to perceive income distribution as very unfair.

Next, we run a similar set of regressions but, instead of considering only the people who responded that income distribution is ‘very unfair,’ we also consider the ones who answered only ‘unfair.’ The output of those regressions is reported in Table 3.

When we use the broader definition of unfairness, the effect of education on perceptions of unfairness becomes stronger: in all the specifications, educational attainment is positively correlated with a sense of distributive unfairness. Moreover, the magnitude of the coefficient increases with the level of qualification: the coefficient of those with tertiary education complete is three times larger than the coefficient of those with only primary education complete. These results are similar to those of Rodriguez (2014), who finds that more years of education are associated with higher perceptions of inequality. The other two main differences with respect to the baseline set of regressions are that the civil status stops being statistically significant, and the male dummy becomes negative and statistically significant (in both cases consistently so across specifications).

As a robustness check, we run the set of regressions reported in column (4), but using an alternative set of inequality indicators instead of the Gini coefficient. Those results are reported in Appendix Table A5. The results confirm the story of a positive and statistically significant correlation between income inequality and unfairness perceptions across a very different set of relative indicators (columns 1-4). Indeed, the Gini coefficient calculated without households with zero income, the Atkinson index, the Theil index and the Generalized Entropy indicator are consistently correlated with unfairness, even after controlling for an individual’s characteristics, while the absolute Gini (our absolute measure of inequality in the table) is negatively correlated with unfairness perceptions.

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