Gender Budgeting

This chapter is devoted to gender budgeting which is a tool aiming at transforming budgets into means for achieving specific gender-motivated ends through government policies. In this chapter, we provide a historical lens to the development of gender budgeting, and we discuss the factors that affect its successful implementation, including political commitment, technical capacity, and availability of suitable data. While we acknowledge that gender budgeting is not a standardised tool and shows heterogeneity in its implementation, we also make clear that it is mainly concentrating on expenditures and less on revenues. The empirical evidence shows that gender budgeting is increasingly practised in OECD countries. We conclude with information about gender budgeting at different levels of government in 16 European countries.