2. BUDGETING FOR GENDER: PROMOTION OF GENDER EQUALITY THROUGH BUDGET Gender aware public finance and budgetary policy have made it evident that the allocation of time and resources within families is both gender and socially conditioned and that it predetermines which family members will join the market and in which ways.8 This refers to the three basic forms of non-market unpaid labour, done by women: subsistence production, the care economy and voluntary community work (see Elson 2002 p.1). These forms of labour are, within the framework of conventional economic policy, assumed to be socially responsible and are not viewed as economic activities; therefore they remain outside the focus of fiscal and monetary policy, despite the fact that they presume the use of scarce resources, primarily labour, and the fact that they provide necessary inputs for both the private and public sector within the market economy. Gender aware government budget analyses recognise the different contributions of men and women in the production and distribution of goods and services and they take into account whether the budget includes the different interests, needs, rights and responsibilities of women and men, girls and boys in the economy. Gender responsive budgeting initiatives, amongst other things, provide answers to following questions: are the budgets and tax systems really gender neutral as it may seem at first; how can gender become an integral part of government policy; how can women and NGOs increase their participation in the drafting of budget proposals and in the collection and analysis of macroeconomic gender disaggregated data? By including the resources needed and/or through the redistribution of existing ones, gender responsive budgets are changing budgetary policy in a way that promotes gender equality. Thus the strategy of gender sensitive budgets includes an increase in budgetary allocations, improvement of the quality of input resources (using civil servant training, more purposeful funding and expenditure), the redistribution of budgetary allocations, changes to the type and quality of public goods and services and changes to the expected outcomes of policies (see Sharp, 2003, p.18). Gender sensitive strategic changes to budgetary policy do not take place in an ‘empty space’, on the contrary they are connected to the overall trends within the economy and society and with the ways in which all other prerequisites for the success of the budget engendering process and its implementation are being met.
2.1. Macroeconomic Environment for Taxation and Public Spending Gender ‘blindness’ of the economic theories, ideologies and policies that do not take into account the different effects they have on women and men is usually accompanied by an insistence on free trade and capital movement and rigid orthodox monetary and fiscal policy. Such economic policies, based on neoliberal ideology9, have proven to be inefficient in 8
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In addition, market operations rely on social and institutional norms that reflect assymetrical power relations between men and women based on their gender, class and race features. Thus, gender based macroeconomic analysis indicates the relevance of non-market processes taking place in each economy that, at the same time, enables and contributes to unhindered market operations. More detail on the gender impliations of economic policy and specific gender assymetries, depending on the concrete macroeconomic policy framework, can also be found in Bakker (1994) Pp.27-29.
Gender responsive budgeting
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