KWDI Korean Women’s Development Institute

This research report is written to summarize the efforts for advancing Gender Budgeting in Korea and is based on a long-term research project intended to continue for ten years. The report consists of two parts. Part 1 focuses on developing an evaluation model through which we can examine the effectiveness of gender budgeting, and it also discusses various methodologies for improving performance indicators used in gender budget programs. Part 2 focuses on designing an efficient operating system for local gender budgeting.

In Part 1, the fol l owings are discussed. First, the current state of gender budgeting is sketched, and the need for the examination of its effectiveness is addressed. In addition, an evaluation model of the overall gender budgeting system is proposed, and the effectiveness of the system is examined by the proposed model (Ch.Ⅱ). Second, gender equality indices of the budgetary programs which have produced some controversies since the implementation of gender budgeting, are categorized into twenty-three groups by the characteristics of the budgetary programs. Furthermore, by making such categories, guidelines for developing indicators for program beneficiaries and gender equality in the programs’ outcomes are proposed in the report(Ch.Ⅲ). In Chapter Ⅳ, survey results on public officials who prepared the gender budget statements for the relevant year are reported. The public officials’ level of understanding of gender budgeting and the problems they faced while preparing the statements are analyzed. Moreover, the results are compared with the last year’s survey results. The findings reveal some of the issues that should be solved prior to further development of gender budgeting at national level. First, a regular inspection and assessment cycle should be imposed on the overall gender budgeting system by building a periodical checking system to check the effectiveness of gender budgeting. By examining the current gender budgeting system in terms of its foundation, operation, and achievements, some of the weaknesses of each sector were identified. A system that can persistentl y check the probl ems and resol ve them in the gender budgeting system shoul d be impl emented. Moreover, performance indicators shoul d be appl ied based on the characteristics of budgetary programs. The twenty-three types of indicators devel oped in this study are expected to hel p the preparation of gender budgeting statements as well as achieving the initial objectives of gender budgeting.

Part 2 focuses on evaluating the results of a gender budgeting pilot project at local level, which was conducted prior to its official start in 2013 fiscal year. Three major cities were selected among the participants of the pilot project, and an in-depth study was conducted on their gender budget statements. By investigating the data from the three locals and going through multiple surveys and workshops, operational problems of the system were identified. Based on the proposed issues, plans for efficiently managing gender budgeting at local level were suggested. For the stable operation of gender budgeting at local level, social consensus must be formed. It is important to increase the l ocal community’s understanding of the objectives of and needs for gender budgeting in the early stage of policy implementation. Hence, efforts should be focused on expanding the social consensus on the implementation of gender budgeting at local l evel. Furthermore, tool s for preparing the gender budget statements should become more localized and advanced. The tools should be constantly reviewed and changed so that it can work as an effective policy tool in achieving the initial objectives of the system as well as being suitabl e for the financial environment and characteristics of the locals. Finally, systematic connections between local gender budgeting and gender mainstreaming policies should be enhanced. In other words, the connections between Gender Impact Analysis, Gender budgeting, and Gender Statistics are vital. The connections between individual systems will help to overcome each system’s limitations and increase gender equality in policy implementation.