Gender budgeting can ensure overall equality

Gender budgeting is the process of applying a gender lens to public financial management, to analyse the gender components in public spending across all sectors - not only social sector budgets - and evaluate their outcomes. Gender neutral fiscal policy can turn gender-blind if there are no systemic corrections. 

While gender budgeting processes around the world have tended to focus on public spending, the tax and non-tax revenue policies can also integrate the needs of men and women, and boys and girls, identifying the key goals or policy outcomes. 

In the decades since its inception, gender budgeting has been developed as an accountability tool and has been used by governments to strengthen economic growth. More than 90 governments around the world are now pursuing gender budgeting, a quarter of which are in the Asia Pacific region, including India. 

The study of the effects of gender budgeting was carried out by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), testing the impact of gender budgeting on fiscal space and gender inequality in the case of sub-national governments in India. 

The inferences from the study show that the States with gender budgeting efforts have made more progress on gender equality in primary school enrolment than those without and that economic growth appears insufficient to generate equality on its own. However, the implications of gender budgeting for fiscal space were more ambiguous.

In the context of Asia Pacific countries, study used dynamic panel data models to link gender equality outcomes with countries adopting or not adopting gender budgeting. The estimation of the determinants of gender equality was established by using the Gender Development Index (GDI) and Gender Inequality Index (GII) as proxies for gender equality.

Using the time span 1990-2013, the Gender Development Index is constructed on the basis of gender equality sensitive indicators (GESI) on three dimensions - education, health and income; and Gender Inequality Index data was used to capture gender disparities in health, women’s empowerment, and labour force participation. 

Categorizing the Asia-Pacific countries into gender budgeting adopting countries and non-gender budgeting adopting countries, the impact of gender budgeting on gender equality indicators was analysed at the macro level and sector-specific levels.

The highlights of the study are that adoption of gender budgeting, not economic growth per se, has a significant influence on reducing the gender inequality outcomes in Asia-Pacific countries. The coefficients of gender budgeting are significantly higher than the panel coefficients of economic growth. 

The dynamic panel estimates also show that public expenditure variables (like public spending on health and education) are significant for the reduction of gender inequality in the region. The sectoral estimates suggest that Gender Inequality Index is significantly linked to the adoption of gender budgeting, public spending on health and female literacy rate.

The impact of gender budgeting on the fiscal space is again ambiguous. The panel estimates show that gender budgeting does not determine the fiscal space at the sectoral level, especially in health and education, in the Asia Pacific.

A crucial result from the study is that gender budgeting does not have any impact on female labour force participation in the Asia Pacific. This result is not surprising as fiscal policy in Asia Pacific countries is, overall, not designed to support a care economy infrastructure, such as state-run child care centres, early childhood education by the state or state-subsidized elderly support. 

Asian governments also do not spend significantly on other infrastructure programmes related to women’s mobility, safety and security to support women’s labour force participation. Higher budgetary allocations to safety and security and gender-conscious infrastructure programmes for transport and energy would likely increase women’s workforce participation.

The empirical evidence from both the IMF and the NIPFP studies reinforces the equity and efficiency perspectives of why a government should adopt gender budgeting. 

Gender budgeting is a tool for transparency and accountability of public expenditure, and it can strengthen inclusive economic growth. This requires two crucial elements: gender-aware allocations (determining the plan and budgets through a gender lens) and governance mechanisms (designing institutional mechanisms to monitor outcomes, rather than financial inputs alone).

Fiscal policy is not gender neutral. Gender budgeting is a fiscal innovation and it encompasses four crucial stages: model-building and knowledge networking specific to a country, institutional design and mechanisms to implement the process, capacity-building of the stakeholders, and accountability mechanisms.

If fiscal rules are inevitable for a country to keep debt and deficits under check, a built-in rule should also be included for a medium-term gender budgeting framework at the sectoral level. This would be in accordance with the Sustainable Development Goals 2030 Agenda to stem the “expenditure re-switching” away from gender-aware financing requirements.

By Pradeep Kumar Panda