Cost-Benefit Analysis Of Gender Budgeting

Thus, gender budgeting looks at the government budget from a gender perspective to assess how it addresses the needs of women in specific areas like, health, education, employment, etc. It is important to note that gender budgets are not separate budgets for men and women and boys and girls. They attempt to disaggregate the government‟s budget according to its impact on men and women respectively. It puts emphasis on reprioritizing the public expenditure rather than increasing the

The first part of the article has addressed the capacity of the Cost-Benefit Analysis (CBA) on equity and efficiency grounds that make Cost-Benefit Analysis a genuine tool in bringing women into central planning process. Several limitations of Cost-Benefit Analysis are also analysed, due to methodological biases of the framework itself as well as out of the political economy of gender in which it has to operate. First limitation is concerned with conversion of all the costs and benefits concerned with the intended project into commensurable sets of values, which is very complicated affair. Next is the problem of incommensurables. Women‟s activity especially in the third world countries takes place outside the market –where monetary prices cannot be assigned to their

Cost-Benefit Analysis is very expensive. The author concludes with critical comment that, the first step should be to conduct cost benefit analysis on CBA itself. If a project or programme related to empowering women is evaluated only for the benefit of policymaking agency without commitments on gender equity, then the CBA analysis will be a waste of resources. The paper concludes that Cost-Benefit Analysis is best suited to interventionist, than participatory projects and preferably related to efficiency rather than equity related objectives and where equity is the goal, to women‟s practical needs rather than their strategic gender interests. Ingrid Palmer (1995) in her paper “Public Finance from a Gender Perspective” draws attention to include gender issues in macroeconomic policies9 . Gender issues in macroeconomic policy can be approached in two ways. First, to focus on the different outcomes of policy for men and women and on changes that are required to bring about gender equity. Secondly, to examine the implications that gender relations and disparities hold for macroeconomic analysis and policy options. This paper highlights on the second