Finally, the third type of exposure to fiscal policy occurs when individuals within a household provide unpaid labor and invest in the care of all household members and the communities in which they exist. These activities belong to social reproduction as defined above.<sup>17</sup> The public provision of education, health care, WASH, and housing services directly provide social reproduction components at low cost. Providing transport and communication infrastructure enables faster access to essential social services for those involved in social reproduction (and therefore lower opportunity cost).

# Which Gender-Based Impacts Are Observed or Deducible?

The impact of an individual fiscal policy, or fiscal policy in general, on gender equality will be multifaceted. To quantify fiscal policy impact, we would like to know (among other things) whether the policy (1) supports social reproduction, (2) creates incentives for more or higher-quality female labor force participation, (3) creates incentives for more or higher-quality male participation in social reproduction, (4) increases the individual purchasing power of women, (5) increases individual agency<sup>18</sup> for women, and (6) increases the per-capita cumulative purchasing power of the household.

The approach developed in this paper does not permit estimation of the impact of fiscal policy on gender inequality or women’s agency along all these dimensions. This is in part due to data limitations. To understand whether and how agency is affected by fiscal policy, for example, would require a wide perspective on the tradeoffs that households face, how options are weighted and judged by all household members, how compromises are made, and which characteristics inform bargaining positions.<sup>19</sup> Understanding the potential for agency also calls for an investigation into prevailing social norms, legal rules, and cultural expectations that may encourage (or limit) agency outside the household.<sup>20</sup> Irrespective of data limitations, our inability to categorize a fiscal policy as “good” or “bad” for gender equality is also partly due to conflicting impacts along these different dimensions. For example, giving benefits to mothers who stay at home to look after their children reduces gender inequality in total incomes while exacerbating gender inequality in labor force participation. In the same vein, generous maternity leave has been shown to discourage women returning to the labor market while voucher systems for childcare have been shown to discourage the use of market-provided childcare services in some contexts (Spiess and Wrohlich 2008).

> 17. These activities should be distinguished from other types of unpaid labor, for example, in subsistence agriculture or labor supplied by household members to a family business.

> 18. Agency is the ability to define goals and act on them; see Donald and others (2020).

> 19. See Bakhtiar and others (2022) for an experimental examination of the processes determining intrahousehold allocations and the impact of those processes on women’s agency.

> 20. When such data is available, or when FIA can be complemented with a discussion of social norms and institutions that limit policy-based progress on gender inequality, a gendered FIA will be much richer and more nuanced. Such information is available from, for example, the Social Institutions and Gender Index; Afrobarometer; the World Values Survey; and Women, Business and the Law. These sources, among others, can be used to complement FIA and triangulate policy-relevant advice.

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