Interviewed women and men ages 65 and above allocate 5 percent of their time to childcare, indicating that elderly dependents in Armenia can contribute to childcare within the household (or family). Women living in households with young children reduce their time allocated to childcare slightly with the presence of elderly members (from 21 to 18 percent).

Empirical results indicate that gender roles and disproportionate time allocations to social reproduction activities constrain women’s time and labor market opportunities, which conditions women’s interactions with the fiscal system. The gender gap (in labor market participation) is consistently higher for households with dependents, who most likely need care instead of helping out by providing it. The fiscal system significantly reduces gender gaps for all household types, but the gaps for households with dependents remain negative and the largest.

Aid from stay-at-home (healthy) elders can reduce gender gaps in labor earnings for households with primary school children (or older) while children and elders can aid with household chores and care for family members in need. Access to affordable and convenient care for children and elderly family members can therefore influence their labor decisions and interactions with the fiscal system, for women in particular, and potentially for every household member.

Results from the Engendered CEQ assessment with time-use data in the Armenia example demonstrates the intricacies in which a model of intrahousehold bargaining would have to consider for it to be useful within a fiscal incidence model. It appears that older dependents can contribute in a positive way to household incomes or social reproduction and care responsibilities of females within the household (or both). The type of contribution made by an older dependent, however, likely depends on the dependent’s gender and health status. Furthermore, in Armenia, the positive nature of the contribution has been neutralized at post-fiscal income stages, which indicates (among other things) that the incorporation of older-age dependents into the household is likely negotiated by the household’s adults. Both the starting positions of the negotiating members and the outcomes are likely affected too by the nature of the contribution as well as the gender of the older-age dependent. A single policy, therefore, may create impacts at different decision or negotiation points, and intrahousehold bargaining models that completely describe interactions and the incentives that constrain those interactions at each of those points will lack generality.

# 5.2 Jordan

To create household types in the Jordan Engendered CEQ assessment, Rodriguez, Wai-Poi, and Woodham (2022) explored whether households could be grouped into commonly occurring categories that exhibit demographic or organizational differences salient in the allocation of care and social reproduction responsibilities on the one hand and the incidence of taxes and spending on the other.<sup>33</sup>

> A relatively small number of categories are needed for tractable analysis. Each category should neither represent too many people so as not to obscure differences between them nor too few people so as to lack representativeness of the entire population. The statistical tradeoff between large groups with precisely estimated average characteristics and smaller groups that would likely show greater deviation from a national average but exhibit less precise estimates should also be taken into account.

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