Article S8.6 Gender-Sensitive Budget Analysis Seminar Leader: Sanjib Kumar Basu Professor, Postgraduate Department of Commerce, St. Xavier’s College, Kolkata, India basu.sanjibkumar[at]gmail.com Government budgets have an essential role in the planning and control of the economic activities of a country. A budget is prepared for a specified period of time and it states the estimated incomes and expenditures for that period. Some of the main functions of a budget are: (a) allocation of resources, (b) distribution of income and wealth, and (c) management of cash flow. In addition, government budgets are also: (a) a means of ensuring that governments are accountable to the parliament for their revenues and expenditures and (b) a measure by which governments can maintain control over their finances. All governments face some constraints on the overall size of the budget. To some extent they are constrained by the ability or willingness of taxpayers to contribute. In poorer countries, because of the inability of taxpayers to contribute sufficiently, they are further constrained by the willingness of donors and lenders to supplement local funds, and also by the acceptability of conditions imposed by the donors and lenders. Other constraints include policy decisions to reduce budget deficits quickly or to increase expenditures such as military spending. The process of gender-sensitive budget analysis attempts to capture the total outlays (whether from national, state, or local budget), which can be shown to be actually reaching/benefiting women. A budget, on the face of it, appears to be a gender-neutral policy instrument. It is set out in terms of financial aggregates: totals and sub-totals of expenditure and revenue, and the resulting budget surplus or deficit. As usually presented, there is no particular mention of women, but no particular mention of men either. However, this appearance of gender-neutrality is more accurately described as gender-blindness. The national budget usually ignores the different socially determined roles, responsibilities, and capabilities of men and women. These differences are generally structured in such a way as to leave women with an unequal position in relation to men in a community. Women have less economic, social, and political power. Gender-sensitive budget analysis refers to a variety of processes and tools aimed at facilitating and assessing the gendered impacts of government budgets. In the evolution of these exercises, the focus has been on auditing government budgets for their impact on women and girls. A gender-sensitive budget analysis has to engage with the effects of government policies and resource allocations on the unpaid activities of the household and community sector. Women and men tend to undertake different roles in economic and social life. Nowhere are these differences more sharply drawn than in the work of households. The productive nature of much household work is gradually gaining recognition. Households are also the base from which much of the care activity in relation to the young, old, sick, and disabled takes place. Gender-sensitive budget analysis or gender budgeting is a process of examining the budget formulation, budgetary policies, and budget outlays through the gender lens. Gender budget, with regard to the government at any level, does not refer to a separate budget for women, rather it is a perspective on budgeting which scrutinises the government budget to reveal its gender-differentiated impact and advocates for greater spending on programmes and schemes to address the socioeconomic disadvantages faced by women. One of the significant studies on analysing the budgets of different states in India from a gender perspective was carried out by Nirmala Banerjee and Poulami Roy (Banerjee & Roy, 2003). They examined the nature and extent of West Bengal’s budgetary policies that were supposed to work towards removing some of the gender-based socio-economic disadvantages of women. This study identified the women-oriented programmes/schemes in the West Bengal budget and compared the outlays for those with the total budget in order to assess the priority for women in the state budget. Three interrelated layers of an economic system were discussed: market economy, public service economy, and care economy. The market economy produces goods and services in response to market demand. The public service economy produces a social and physical infrastructure, which is used for consumption and investment in the market economy and the care economy. The care economy produces family- and community-oriented goods and services as part of the process of caring for people. Work in the care economy is not paid, though it may be supported by transfer payments from the government (such as pension and child benefit). The care economy is excluded, as a matter of principle, from the UN system of national accounts. Both men and women work in the care economy, but overall it is relatively intensive in its use of female labour. The care economy contributes to the welfare of the individuals receiving care, but it also contributes to the activities of the commodity economy and the public service economy by supplying human resource and by maintaining the social framework. The three layers of the economy are interdependent, but the interdependencies are not widely recognised. In order to identify the impact of budget expenditures on women and girls, three categories of expenditures are important: (a) specifically targeted expenditures by government departments and authorities to women or men in the community intended to meet their particular needs, (b) equal employment opportunity expenditure by government agencies on their employees, and (c) general or mainstream budget expenditures by government agencies which make goods or services available to the whole community, but which are assessed for their gender impact. Together they add up to 100 per cent of budget expenditures. The seminar leader’s gender-sensitive analysis of the West Bengal budget led to the following findings: (a) The total outlay earmarked for women in West Bengal accounted for only 6.1 per cent of the total state budget outlay in 2003-04, which increased to 6.7 per cent in 2004-05 and 7.5 per cent in 2005-06. The results implied that the proportion of funds earmarked for women was steadily increasing over the years. (b) In terms of priorities for the different needs of women, outlays earmarked for women’s education accounted for 5.18 per cent of the total state budget outlay in 2003-04, which increased to 5.83 per cent in 2004-05 and 6.57 per cent in 2005-06. (c) The outlay earmarked for women’s education accounts for a major chunk of the total outlay earmarked for women in the state budget, which reached around 87 per cent of the total gender budget (i.e., total outlay earmarked for women) in 2005-06 (budget estimate). The shares of women’s nutrition and women’s health in the gender budget are much lower at around 6.5 per cent and less than 4 per cent respectively. And, the shares of women’s livelihood and welfare of women in difficult circumstances in the total outlays earmarked for women are very small. The discourse in India on analysing public expenditure from the gender perspective is usually traced back to the report of the Committee on the Status of Women in India (titled, Towards Equality), brought out by the Government of India in 1974. However, the Ninth Five Year Plan (1997-2002) marked a significant progress in this regard; it adopted the strategy of women’s component plan (WCP) which was a precursor to the adoption of gender budgeting. The Tenth Five Year Plan (2002-07) marked another significant step forward as it envisaged immediate action in tying up these two effective concepts of WCP and gender budgeting to play a complementary role to each other, and thus ensure both preventive and post facto action in enabling women to receive their rightful share from all the women-related general development schemes. The need for taking up gender budgeting was also recognised in a national policy, which observed, “availability of adequate financial, human and market resources to implement the Policy will be managed by concerned Departments, financial credit institutions and banks, private sector, civil society and other connected institutions” (National Policy for the Empowerment of Women, 2001, para. 10.1). To conclude it can be said that a gender-sensitive budget is not a separate budget for women. Rather, it is an analysis of the government budget to establish the budget’s differential impact on women and men and on different groups of women and men. Gender-sensitive budgeting is about translating the government’s commitment to gender equality into actual budgetary allocations. References Xavier Institute of Management, Xavier Square, Bhubaneswar 751013, India Research World (ISSN 0974-2379) http://www1.ximb.ac.in/RW.nsf/pages/Home | ||
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