Gender budgeting and improved fiscal policies to promote gender equality and women's advancement

This chapter starts by providing the rationale for using gender budgeting. Gender budgeting is an approach to budgeting that uses fiscal policy and public financial management to promote gender equality, and women's and girls' development. The chapter then reviews the economic principles underlying gender budgeting. Finally, it provides an overview of the fiscal policies associated with achieving gender equality, including examples from numerous countries at all levels of economic development. This chapter discusses how gender budgeting can improve fiscal policies to produce beneficial economic and social outcomes. It describes an economic framework for addressing gender equality through fiscal policies. The chapter examines fiscal policies that have been adopted to achieve gender equality objectives. The proportion of public expenditure dedicated specifically to gender equality objectives is limited. However, the proportion of expenditure that actually contributes to gender equality and women's advancement is much larger because it encompasses spending across many areas of the budget. The scope and need for fiscal policies that promote gender equality, or gender budgeting, arises when public budgeting does not adequately bring about the full economic and social benefits of gender equality and women's and girls' development. On the administrative side, a system of accounting for and reporting on government budget execution could track whether spending for gender-related goals was actually taking place.