provide for others (for example). As Bargain (2022) notes, applying this assumption in developing countries is problematic because “it is not common to find people living alone.”<sup>12</sup> The approach taken in this paper instead exploits household demographic composition and economic information to guide estimates of which household activities benefit the most (on net) from fiscal policies and which individual household members fill those roles. It also falls squarely within the “accounting” approach to fiscal incidence analysis which attempts to map fiscal facts (e.g., the taxes collected and the expenditures made) to the behaviors observed in a cross-section of individuals. This analytical choice also limits us to a description of how total economic activity at the household level is supported or hindered by fiscal policies and for whom within the household that such support or hindrance will matter most. These limitations are sufficiently different from those relevant for the intrahousehold bargaining literature, and we do not propose our method as a substitute for those approaches.

The methodology we propose is generalizable to most fiscal, socioeconomic, and cultural contexts for the following reasons. First, we include a broader set of activities and points of interaction with the fiscal system, such that individuals who spend most of their productive hours working without remuneration can nonetheless be made more productive by, or face burdens from, fiscal policy. Second, we propose procedures for a gendered fiscal incidence analysis where only the household-level data required for standard CEQ assessments is available and suggest modifications to those procedures when richer individual-level data is available.

# 3 Gender Inequality, Social Reproduction, and Fiscal Policy

Gender is a normative social construct defining and differentiating the roles, rights, entitlements, responsibilities, and social obligations of women and men. Gender is also a set of expectations providing positive and negative incentives for broad-based compliance with those roles, responsibilities, and obligations. Gender relations are embedded in markets and institutions and are integral to how an economy functions. Economic institutions, policies, and the implicit rules and traditions that govern aspects of economic life can exacerbate, ameliorate, or simply modify existing gender inequalities.<sup>13</sup> The nature, degree, and social, cultural, and institutional location of these gender differences vary from one society to the next; historically they have favored men (Beneria, Berik, and Floro 2016).

> 12. Potential solutions to this problem provide estimation strategies to generate individual budget shares from household expenditure data alone without data on single individuals (Dunbar and others 2013). However, these solutions must also restrict preferences across household compositions or across people in order to identify individual allocation shares. Either solution flattens estimated fiscal policy impacts precisely where we believe these impacts would exhibit variability that enhances or discourages gender equity.

> 13. See chapters in Berik and Kongar 2021, including Berik and Kongar, Beneria and Sen, Seguino, and Braunstein. See also Duflo (2012), and World Bank (2012).

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