Gender and Fiscal Policy — A Methodological Proposal and Its Application to Jordan and Armenia

Fiscal policies affect households and individuals in a variety of ways. Even though these effects are likely to be different for men and women, conventional tools of fiscal incidence analysis are typically unable to capture these gender differences. Using a particular type of incidence analysis known in the literature as the Commitment to Equity framework, this paper proposes a methodology to overcome this challenge. A particular novelty the paper introduces is the explicit incorporation of social reproduction into the fiscal incidence analysis framework, enabling the implicit valuation of unpaid work that is typically undertaken by women on activities such as cooking, cleaning, and caring for children and the elderly. Applying this methodology to the cases of Jordan and Armenia — two countries with very different approaches to fiscal policy and cultural norms around the economic and social roles of men and women — the paper also highlights some of the insights that this engendered perspective could add to standard fiscal incidence analysis.