Expenditure Incidence Analysis: A Gender-Responsive Budgeting Tool for Educational Expenditure in Timor-Leste?

Abstract

Gender-disaggregated expenditure incidence analysis (EIA) is a tool for assessing the gender responsiveness of budgets and policies. However, to date there has been a limited take-up of gender-disaggregated EIA in policy and budget decision making. Using data from the 2007 Timor-Leste Living Standards Survey (TLLSS) and interviews and discussions with stakeholders, this paper conducts an EIA of expenditures on public schools and discusses the effectiveness of this analysis as an input into budget decision making. While gender-disaggregated EIA can assist in identifying gender gaps, its potential can only be fulfilled when combined with additional gender analysis and supported by a deep understanding of budget decision-making processes and the actors involved. The gender-disaggregated EIA of Timor- Leste's educational spending confirmed its usefulness as an indicator of inequalities in educational expenditure. However, a range of political, cultural, and technical barriers constrains the use of gender-disaggregated EIA in policy and budget decision making.

• Expenditure incidence analysis
• gender-responsive budgeting
• Timor-Leste
• gender

• H19
• H89
• I28

Acknowledgments

We are grateful for the support provided to us by a number of government agencies in Timor-Leste: Ministry of Education and Culture, National Statistics Department, Ministry of Finance, and the Secretary of State for Promotion of Equality. UN Women Timor-Leste also provided practical support for our data collection efforts in Timor-Leste. AusAID provided valuable financial support for the project. All personal information that would allow the identification of any person or person(s) described in the article has been removed.

Notes

1. These studies cover education and health expenditures in developing countries, including South America and Africa (Glick, Saha, and Younger 2004).

2. There are also a small number of studies of the incidence of taxation on the income of households disaggregated according to their gender characteristics. Analysis for Argentina, India, Mexico, Ghana, Morocco, and South Africa is provided in Caren Grown and Imraan Valodia (2010). A more detailed analysis of the incidence of indirect taxes in South Africa is provided by Daniela M. Casale (2012). Tax incidence analysis has rarely been used in GRB initiatives, with the exception of South Africa and UK.

3. The authors thank the Statistics Department at the Ministry of Finance for access to the 2001 and 2007 Timor-Leste Living Standards Surveys. Our thanks to the Ministry of Education and SEPI for collaborating on this project.

4. Finer breakdowns by region could be pursued but not by type of school as this data is not available. We do not report on gender differences by region because the factors influencing regional differences in Timor-Leste are complex and are not directly relevant to the themes of this paper. Furthermore, our analysis is based on attendance rates, which are akin to participation rates.

5. In Timor-Leste, primary school age is 6–11 years, pre-secondary school age is 12–14 years, and secondary school age is 15–17 years. The datasets used did not distinguish between single- and mixed-sex schools. This information is now available in the Education Management Information System, but reliable data for the period of this study (2006–7) was not available.

6. The TLLSS does contain a measure of total household food consumption in dollars; but using this measure would not allow us to directly assess the effects of poverty on school attendance, nor would it enable us to take into account regional variations in consumption norms.

7. There is a considerable literature on the positive impact of maternal education on children's health and education. For a summary of literature prior to 1995, see Hill and King (1995). More recent studies include Deon Filmer (2006), who shows that educating women has a greater impact on children's schooling than educating men across a wide range of developing countries; Tahir Andrabi, Jishnu Das, and AsimKhwaja (2009), who show that mother's education has a positive impact on children's education in Pakistan; and Jann Lay and Anne Sophie Robilliard (2009), who show that mother's educational attainment has a strong positive impact on child mortality in Sub-Saharan Africa.