Title of paper:
‘Women and Equality: Why Taxation, Social Transfers, and Government Budgets Matter’
Abstract:
Revenue-raising systems and public budgets shape almost every aspect of economic and cultural life. The power to raise and spend public revenues remains fundamentally associated with the nation state (Levi 1989, Lahey 2011), but the fiscal systems and welfare regimes in welfare economies are also challenged by a world of unstable, mobile, and integrated markets (Philipps et. al. 2011). While no clear consensus has emerged about what the ideal revenue system looks like, major international financial and development organizations, such as the OECD, the IMF, and the World Bank, have increasingly promoted more competitive fiscal environments under the overall objective of stimulating economic growth. This promotion takes the form, for example, of encouraging investment, risk-taking, entrepreneurship, and an increased incentive to take on paid work. The dominant ideology of tax design has been to reduce the degree of progressivity in tax systems, reduce total revenue,s and shift some of the tax burden from income tax to consumption taxation (Piper 2005, Owens 2006, Lahey 2011). As men in general have higher incomes from paid work, and own more wealth both as capital assets and business shares, they also benefit more from this type of tax design.
Economic inequality between men and women is deeply rooted in legal cultures and economic structures, most importantly, in the division of labour. Traditionally, men’s labour has been valued publicly in the market, while women’s reproductive labour inside the private domain of the family or household has not been afforded any economic recognition. Transplanting this normative pattern has also shaped the gender-segregation of men’s and women’s work on the labour market, and contributed to assigning a lower value to women’s work once they entered that market (Gunnarsson 2003; Gunnarsson 2011 a). Welfare economies are facing massively gendered social risks (Bonoli 2005) created by the transformations of labour markets, demographic aging, and family structures, which will put additional pressure on the organizing and financing of care work and reproduction, with enormous implications for the gendered division of paid and unpaid work. However, governments and international bodies have never seriously considered the gendered nature of taxation and public expenditures. Within this international frame, the following issues are explored in this paper:
- the relation between economic gender equality and taxation,
- basic ontological challenges for gender studies in the area of taxation and budgeting,
- how structural choices in tax policy design and social transfers contribute to gender inequality.
Gender research from various parts of the OECD world has shown that even though taxation is not necessarily ‘the’ original source of economic structures of inequality between men and women, it powerfully perpetuates those relations when left unexamined, yet contains tools that can be used to change gendered economic gaps.