# 6 Conclusions

National advocates and international frameworks like the Sustainable Development Goals have called upon governments to use the policy tools at their disposal to reduce income inequality and gender inequality. However, development stakeholders do not have a compact, low-cost, and transparent tool for estimating how fiscal policies are ameliorating or exacerbating inequalities in opportunities or outcomes between genders.

This paper has sought to develop such a tool. While our approach cannot illuminate all dimensions of gender inequality, it represents a transparent and low-data-cost way to expand on the well-established and globally prevalent CEQ assessment methodology to help stakeholders determine whether fiscal policy targets gender inequalities in economic production and social reproduction. Our proposal involves no extra data but can incorporate additional data when such data are available. We developed a method for applying FIA to household typologies based on underlying survey information that helps put in focus the different roles men and women play, and the different activities they pursue in paid labor outside the house and in unpaid social reproduction activities inside the house. By bringing social reproduction activities – which are critical for the continued strengthening of social, cultural, legal, and economic institutions –together with economic activities, we can begin to estimate whether and how fiscal policy supports household members in their individual and varied roles.

The application of a gendered perspective in fiscal incidence analysis is revealing in a number of ways. It adds greater richness to the standard analysis of fiscal policy’s impact on poverty and inequality by highlighting which male-type or female-type households within a welfare distribution gain or lose from fiscal policy. Because it adds information on the sex, age, and employment status of individual household members, it also reveals the extent to which fiscal policy supports household members in their individual roles and activities.

In Armenia, for instance, the household type defined by the sex of the main wage earner was critical for understanding where and how fiscal policy affects household members differently. The direct tax burdens in households where women accounted for 60 percent (or more) of wage earnings were lower than in households where men accounted for 60 percent (or more) of wage earnings. At first glance, it appears that direct tax policy reduces gender gaps in wage earnings and implicitly encourages women’s labor force participation. However, reduced tax burdens in households with women as the primary wage earner might equally reflect more limited opportunities for women, including higher frequency of informal employment, household production for self-consumption, or other economic activities that avoid taxes.

In Jordan, women are overwhelmingly responsible for social reproduction activities including the care of dependents, but fiscal policy supporting social reproduction activities does not lead to greater participation by women in paid labor. That is because, in Jordan, social norms and other cultural features create the expectation that married women with or without children, and in households with or without other dependents, will remain out of the workforce. For this reason, among others, fiscal policy is less effective at reducing income inequality between households with and without dependents and with and without women as income earners. However, fiscal policy could play a role by supporting services for children and others who need care.

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