2019
Language:
English

Effect of fiscal policies on gender equality

This paper analyzes the effect of fiscal policies in Uganda and Rwanda on gender equality in education, health and infrastructure outcomes. Government budgets and fiscal measures can play an important role in promoting women’s development and gender equality, an approach commonly referred to as gender budgeting. First using a fixed effect approach, we find that fiscal policies have a significant, positive impact on education. Using years on education as one of our education indicators, we find that on average, the girls increase their education by 0.7 years. In the same way, when we analyze infrastructure outcomes we find a significant reduction on the time it takes for women to collect water. Similarly, for health outcomes, the probability of women of having children in their houses decreases when gender budgeting policies are present. For our second approach we use the synthetic control method and we find that if the gender budgeting policies wouldn’t have been implement, education and health outcomes for both countries wouldn’t have performed as good as with the policy implementation. On average the gap between the years of education and the contrafactual is 0.5 years of education for Rwanda and 0.2 years for Uganda. We found positive results for our health outcomes as well.