Philippines - The impact of fiscal restraint on budgetary allocations for women's programs

The study also undertakes a gender-disaggregated benefit incidence analysis of the mainstream or untargeted expenditures of the selected departments.

The main findings include:

• not all agencies were successful in protecting the funding for gender / women-targeted programmes in the face of the fiscal difficulties in 1997-2003. Some (e.g., DOH) were more successful than others (e.g., DSWD) in this respect
• gender / women-targeted programmes were adversely affected by the fiscal constraints during the period under study, as the overall budget of the central government became smaller even as the budget share of some gender / women-targeted programmes increased. Real per capita spending on targeted programmes declined in all of the departments included in this study
• the availability of sex-disaggregated information is lacking in many of the programmes provided by the selected agencies.

The study concludes by emphasising that budget analysis has to be better informed by gender analysis. It should be noted that even if there is no gender bias in the formal policies and procedures that govern the delivery of services of various government agencies, gender bias might result from the informal rules, attitudes and behaviour not only of service providers but also that of the target clientele.

[adapted from author]

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PUBLISHER About: Philippine Institute for Development Studies (PIDS)

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