GN-PBO Gender Budgeting Webinar Presentation - Armine Yalnizyan (April 24, 2017)

1. Gender Budgeting 101:
Why Greater Equality Pays Off
And Why It’s So Hard to Do
World Bank-sponsored Global
Network of PBOs Webinar
April 24, 2017
Armine Yalnizyan

2. The New Abnormal: “Slowth”
Gender Budgeting 101 GN-PBO Webinar
April 24, 2017 Armine Yalnizyan
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3. Why Practice Gender Budgeting?
• Economic optimization
– Growth from better resource allocation (L, K, tech)
• Social efficiencies
– Paid and unpaid labour, lower risk from broader
access to basics
• Fiscal improvements
– Higher revenues, lower costs, less inequitable
results
• Greater Political Accountability
– Ex ante target setting, ex post review, better data
Gender Budgeting 101 GN-PBO Webinar
April 24, 2017 Armine Yalnizyan
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4. Who Practices Gender Budgeting?
• OECD 2016 survey: 12 nations (plus 1)
– Austria, Belgium, Finland, Iceland, Israel, Japan,
Korea, Mexico, Netherlands, Norway, Spain,
Sweden….since 2017 Canada
• IMF survey: 23 nations, mostly non-OECD
– Australia, India, Philippines, Bangladesh, Rep. of
Korea, Albania, Macedonia, Ukraine, Morocco,
Afghanistan, Timor, Leste, Rwanda, Uganda,
Mexico, Ecuador, Bolivia, El Salvador
Gender Budgeting 101 GN-PBO Webinar
April 24, 2017 Armine Yalnizyan
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5. How To Do Gender Budgeting?
Ex Ante
• Establish baseline: who gets what?
• Needs assessment
• Develop strategy: targets/timelines, resources
• Indicators to change: VAW Rates, Access to Utilities
(water, fuel/energy, telcom); Health/education
outcomes; % Budget on Housing, Child Care,
Education; Labour Force Participation Rates; Wage
Gap; Social Security (Pensions, jobless benefits); %
of tax expenditures
Gender Budgeting 101 GN-PBO Webinar
April 24, 2017 Armine Yalnizyan
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6. How To Do Gender Budgeting?
Ex Post
• Shape budgetary process by assigning performance
expectations (cf. fiscal “anchor” concept of debt to
GDP), review resource allocation, measure
incidence of budgetary measures
• Within Finance, outside Finance
(government/opposition/civil society); gender audit
• Separate gendered analysis/documents or built into
budget that review outcomes from previous
budgets; progress on targets/timelines
Gender Budgeting 101 GN-PBO Webinar
April 24, 2017 Armine Yalnizyan
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7. Prioritize Focus on Expenses or Revenues?
Cost/Benefit of Federal Spending
• Women use/provide more public services BUT
• Easier to calculate costs than benefits
• Focus on taxes/tax expenditures more easily
measured; can see who pays/gets tax cuts (“winners
and losers”)
• Incidence of benefits of services, costs of service loss
harder to measure (time frame of benefit;
distribution x age, gender, income, immigration,
racial status)
Gender Budgeting 101 GN-PBO Webinar
April 24, 2017 Armine Yalnizyan
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8. Vermaeten: Fed Spending on Housing in 1994
was Redistributive, in $ or by % of Income
Gender Budgeting 101 GN-PBO Webinar
April 24, 2017 Armine Yalnizyan
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9. CCPA: Government Services Worth >2x
Incomes of Poorest Households, 2006
Gender Budgeting 101 GN-PBO Webinar
April 24, 2017 Armine Yalnizyan
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10. “More Money In Your Pockets” –
Whose Pockets?
Who Do Tax Cuts Reach?
• As of 2015 final tax
statistics (2013 incomes)
–27.7% of men did not
have taxable income
–38.9%of women did not
have taxable income
• Since 2008, data on income
class plus gender no longer
published
Who do Services Reach?
• Often we don’t know, by
Age, By Sex, by Income; but
typically women are more
reliant on public services
• Long-form Census is one
source of data
• Administrative data (ex.
health care, education,
social housing)
• Only Census provides race,
immigration status data
Gender Budgeting 101 GN-PBO Webinar
April 24, 2017 Armine Yalnizyan
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11. What Do You Need?
• Ability to track past program
specific spending
– Public Accounts, Tax
Expenditures
• Ability to model
costs/benefits of future
proposals
• Data
• Interest of
government/opposition
• Resources: no $, no strategy
Gender Budgeting 101 GN-PBO Webinar
April 24, 2017 Armine Yalnizyan
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12. Does Size Matter?
Gender Budgeting 101 GN-PBO Webinar
April 24, 2017 Armine Yalnizyan
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13. Gender Budgeting 101 Takeaways
• Within context of slowth and increasingly fractious
politics, distributional considerations in budgets
matter more than ever
• Gender budgeting can improve economic
performance, political accountability, but it requires
more public spending
• Budget measures that tackle gender inequality could
become politically popular … but maybe not quickly
Gender Budgeting 101 GN-PBO Webinar
April 24, 2017 Armine Yalnizyan 13

14. Twitter @ArmineYalnizyan
Thank you for your time.