Preference for Redistribution and Inequality Perception in China: Evidence from the CGSS 2006

In this paper I investigate the conditional correlation between preference for redistribution and the perceived role of "circumstances" and "effort" using the Chinese General Social Survey. I found very signi?cant correlations, thus validating the hypothesis of "sense of justice" for China. The migrant worker group who has dual identity (living/working in an urban area while being registered as a rural individual) is analysed in order to identify a discrimination effect (induced by the Chinese rural-urban segmentation policy) upon attitudes. However, being migrant is an endogenous variable to the attitude variables and the consistent estimate of this effect is much more important than the effect produced by a naïve estimate. The econometric model is a multivariate triangular LDV system with a binary endogenous explanatory variable estimated via a GHK simulator method. To implement the GHK calculations, I propose a parametric constraint to impose the positivity of the 3 × 3 correlation matrix. A generalisation for higher dimension cases is provided.