taxes), direct transfers from NAF, the bread subsidy compensation scheme, indirect subsidies to electricity and water and in-kind benefits for education and health.

Firstly, we derive household typologies based on their demographic characteristics, and the participation of men and women in household income. We find that using categories based on the gendered contribution to household income is insufficient to assess whether the fiscal system reduces gender poverty gaps because households where women are the main earners in Jordan are a small and selected group, often wealthier than other households. Instead, we focus on the fiscal and care categories, which provide a more nuanced view of household composition in Jordan.

We show that the receipt of in-kind benefits, primarily education, determines which fiscal or care groups have the largest net benefits from the fiscal system. When focusing only on cash benefits, the system is very close to neutral for all fiscal and care groups. In other words, no group is a significant net beneficiary or net contributor to the system. This contrasts with the findings in Rodriguez and Wai-Poi (2021), where much of the progressivity of the fiscal system, outside in-kind benefits, was driven by the poorest households having a more concentrated share of direct transfers compared to richer ones, especially relative to their incomes. Instead, across fiscal or care categories, direct transfers are more spread across all groups and thus do not have a sizeable impact on the net benefits received by one group over the other.

Our results also show that the fiscal system in Jordan is reducing within-group inequalities but has only a very small impact on inequalities across groups. This is the case for inequality across both fiscal and care categories. Further, most of the reduction happens between market and disposable income, that is, when direct taxes and transfers are added to the fiscal system. These findings reinforce those presented in Rodriguez and Wai-Poi (2021). There, it was shown that the direct fiscal instruments (direct transfers and direct taxes) were the most cost-effective in reducing overall vertical inequality. This overall impact is also reflected in inequality within the groups (which is akin to vertical inequality within each group), but they are not as effective in lowering disparities across groups. In particular, the fiscal system does almost nothing to bring down between-group inequalities, though they are very low at the outset. This, however, hides the fact that for some groups, the fiscal system helps to reduce their contribution to between-group inequality.

These findings can help Jordan to think about how to use the fiscal system to promote gender equity goals. The country, even before the pandemic, had one of the lowest rates of female labour force participation in the world. While the country has set itself a target of raising this figure, the COVID-19 pandemic has only made the inclusion of women in the labour market a more pressing yet difficult issue. The fiscal space has become even tighter as the country has invested in emergency cash assistance on top of direct health expenditures needed to respond to the pandemic and while tax receipts and economic growth have fallen. Conditions in the labour market deteriorated, deterring even more women from engaging in economic activities. Unemployment rates, especially for women and young people, rose dramatically; women in the private sector were at a higher risk of both losing their jobs and not being able to return to work given specific constraints they face during economic shocks and subsequent shrinking of the job market. They are also likely the ones who bear the greatest responsibilities for childcare during school closures as well as family members who may fall sick. The results of this study show that while the fiscal system was more heavily benefiting households with children in school (fiscal categories) or with dependents (care categories), the overall net impacts, even for these households, were very small, especially once excluding in-kind benefits. More could be done to reward those households through the most cost-effective fiscal instruments (direct taxes and transfers) and in this way help to incentivise women to engage in economic activity and participate more fully in the economy.