Issues and Policy Recommendations

By Kathleen A. Lahey: Women in 1995 and the establishment of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2015, increasing attention has been focused on how tax laws shape women’s lives, affect their access to property, incomes, and public services, and transmit gendered social expectations and stereotypes within societies, across borders, and through the generations.

Attention to the gender impact of tax laws has been accelerated by key trends in public finance policy frameworks. Beginning in 2005, the OECD and other international organizations began to recommend that countries at all levels of development focus on tax and spending cuts to stimulate economic growth. In the aftermath of the 2007/2008 global financial crisis, although many countries responded to the crisis by expanding selected spending measures to offset the recessionary effects of the crisis, the IMF began in 2010 to turn the focus back to fiscal consolidation through tax and spending cuts to promote economic recovery. Since then, the majority of countries at all levels of development began to replace crisis policies with fiscal austerity programs to cut spending on public resources and shift revenue production from progressive tax structures to regressive consumption taxes and privatization of public assets and services.

During this past decade, income inequalities have increased gaps between rich and poor due to lower levels of taxation on high incomes, increased business and individual use of transnational tax reductions and tax havens, over-reliance on shortterm extractive revenues and tax incentives to the corporate sector, and falling levels of public support for key drivers of economic development such as health, education, transportation, and income security spending…Gender, Taxation, and Equality in Developing Countries

Marilena Nardi
www.w-t-w.org/en/cartoon/marilena-nardi/