Integrating time in public policy: Any evidence from gender diagnosis and budgeting

Incorporating time in public policy making is an elusive area of research. Despite the fact that gender budgeting is emerging as a significant socio-economic tool to analyze the fiscal policies to identify its effect on gender equity, the integration of time use statistics into this process remain partial or even nil across countries. If gender budgeting is predominantly based on the indexbased gender diagnosis, a relook into the construction of the gender (inequality) index is relevant. This is significant to avoid a partial capture of gender diagnosis in the budget policy making. The Hard-to-Price services are hardly analysed for public policy making. The issue is all the more revealing, as the available gender (inequality) index so far has not integrated time use statistics in its calculations. From a public finance perspective, gender budgeting process often rest on the assumption that mainstream expenditure such as public infrastructure is non rival in nature and applying gender lens to these is not feasible. This argument is refuted by the time budget statistics. The time budget data revealed that this argument is often flawed, as there is intrinsic gender dimension to the non-rival expenditure.