expanding the overall tax base, as well as through international borrowing and development assistance. Several developing countries, including Ecuador, Lesotho and Thailand, have taken advantage of debt restructuring in order to free up resources for social protection.18 Other countries such as Cambodia, Costa Rica and Sri Lanka have reduced defence and security expenditures to support increased social spending. Some countries, such as the Plurinational State of Bolivia and Botswana, have used revenues generated from natural resource extraction to finance their social protection systems, including health-care programmes, income support for vulnerable populations and old-age pensions. Deficit spending is another option. Such spending is usually justified for ‘hard’ infrastructure projects that are classified as ‘investments’. While spending on education, health or water and sanitation is often seen as ‘consumption’, it can actually raise productivity, encourage private investment and stimulate higher rates of growth that can generate the taxes needed to pay back the debt. There are therefore strong grounds for using deficit spending to finance social protection and basic social services, since critical investments in human capacities can ultimately create stronger economies and fairer societies. Tax systems can also be used to redistribute income and redress women’s socio-economic disadvantage by ensuring that women and marginalized groups are not disproportionately burdened. For example, value-added and sales taxes on basic consumption items should be exempted or zerorated, since such spending absorbs a large share of poorer people’s and specifically women’s income. Meanwhile, tax exemptions and allowances that primarily benefit wealthier groups can be minimized or removed to ensure these groups contribute their fair share. Gender-responsive budgeting is increasingly being used to assess and guide revenue collection and spending decisions. In the United Republic of Tanzania, for example, primary school fees were abolished and farm input subsidies were reintroduced in response to genderresponsive budget initiatives led by women’s rights organizations.
Global policy coordination is essential to create a macroeconomic environment that is conducive to the realization of women’s rights. The growing integration of the world’s economies means that actions taken by one government affect the realization of rights elsewhere. Moreover, the proliferation of agreements to liberalize trade and financial flows between countries limits the policy space of individual governments. The lack of global coordination also affects the ability of governments to mobilize resources. Multinational corporations, for example, use a variety of accounting techniques to lower their tax obligations, thereby diminishing their overall contribution to the economies where they operate. Estimates of tax revenue lost to developing countries due to trade mispricing alone amount to an estimated US$98 to $106 billion per year, nearly $20 billion more than the annual capital costs needed to achieve universal water and sanitation coverage by 2015.19 The current system of global governance exacerbates, rather than mitigates, the gender bias in macroeconomic policy. In most existing institutions, including the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the G20 and the World Trade Organization, power relations are such that governments of the poorest countries do not have an equal say in the decisions that affect them the most, let alone women in those countries. Global cooperation for the realization of economic and social rights can only be achieved if these institutions are democratized and powerful global players, from national governments to transnational corporations, accept that the obligation to respect, protect and fulfil human rights extends beyond borders.
SHARING RESPONSIBILITY AND ACTING COLLECTIVELY FOR WOMEN’S RIGHTS Human rights treaties have been used as the basis for new national legislation—for example, to address violence against women. But the power of human rights goes beyond the legislative domain. They provide the ethical basis and inspiration for collective action to change policies as well as social norms, attitudes and practices. Human