KWDI Korean Women’s Development Institute

A Panel Data Analysis on the Effects of 2010~2012 Gender Budget Statements on the Gender Gap of Program Benefits 

Young-Sook Kim
Myoung-Jae Lee
Hyo-Seon Kim

 

Gender Budgeting System was introduced by the National Finance Act in 2006. The first gender budget statement was prepared in 2010 and the first gender budget balance sheet was submitted to the National Assembly in 2011. This study attempts to evaluate whether gender budget statements were effective in terms of decreasing the gender gap of program benefits during 2010~2012. First, we created a panel data set with 2010~2012 gender budget statements, and the unit of data merging was a program or an activity which was included across all the budget statements. There were several errors in variable entries, and we corrected them by using a more recent version of gender budget statement when building the panel data. Then, we compared the changes in program benefits by gender after the submission of gender budget statements. It was found that even though gender budgeting during 2010~2012 did not result in visible accomplishments in decreasing the gender gap, they still provided valuable data, such as gender segregated statistics related to program budget and program benefits. Also, we found that the gender gap decreased during 2011~2012 which was statistically significant. For the improvements of gender budgeting in Korea, it is crucial to support government officials to have adequate education and training for them to conduct proper assessments. And the panel data set on gender budget statements needs to be continuously built to measure quantifiable effectiveness of gender budgeting in the future.