KWDI Korean Women’s Development Institute

This study is the third-year research results to incorporate gender perspectives into the national budget allocation in Korea. As gender budget statement and balance sheet become mandatory in fiscal year 2010, this year marks the launch of gender budgeting in Korea. For gender budgeting to take root as an effective tool to enhance gender equality in Korea, gender budgeting should be systematically monitored from the beginning and kept being complemented going forward. At the same time, there is need to develop ways to improve diverse role-players’ capacity to implement gender budgeting. In this regard, we focused on monitoring the drawing-up process of budget statement and seeking ways to improve diverse role-players’ gender budgeting capacity.

 

The first theme of this year is to monitor how the 2010 Gender Budget Statement is written and identify measures to further improve gender budgeting of Korea.

-The 2010 Gender Budget Statement involves 195 projects to be carried out by 29 government ministries and agencies. While some point that the absolute number of projects is not enough, we view it a feat that 29 central ministries and agencies took part in gender budgeting at the first year and close to 200 projects are included in this statement.

-The most meaningful outcome of producing the gender budget statements is that officials in charge came to have better understanding of gender budgeting. In fact, survey data showed the following : In the process of producing this statement, 65% of the respondents said they came to have understanding of gender budgeting, 64.7% replied that they would try to close any gender divergence in benefits and 59.0% said they came to know that government budget can have different effects to men and women.

-Several limitations, however, should be pointed out. That is, the format of gender budget statement does not reveal the government’s dedication to gender equality. Some statistics in the statement are insufficient and not gender disaggregated. The gender budget statement remains as a report containing gender composition of each project’s beneficiaries, not highly regarded in budget allocation process.

 

The second theme is to measure gender budgeting capacity and design appropriate training programs.

-Gender budgeting requires adequate role divisions and cooperation among not only the government but also the National Assembly and civil society. This gives rise to the need to measure the capacity of all players in gender budgeting and design an adequate training in order to ensure gender budgeting is incorporated in Korean society.

-We examined the capacity of all role players directly or indirectly involved in implementing gender budgeting and identified their demand for education on gender budgeting.

-We also developed an education program on gender budgeting consisting of four disciplines and 14 subjects and set forth action plans to conduct training for each group. In addition, standard lecture modules were developed.

 

The third theme is to examine ways to engage civil society in gender budgeting.

-Civil societies, especially women’s groups played a leading role in gender budgeting in Korea. After the legislation of gender budgeting, however, their participation has not been active as before. Many reasons may explain this phenomenon. They don’t have enough expertise in specific budget programs nor have cooperative relationships with experts. There are not enough training programs targeting them. Divergence in interests of civil societies or focus of women advocacy groups have resulted in conflict in selecting issues subject to analysis, which caused difficulties in their partnership.

-To facilitate civil society’s participation in gender budgeting, women’s organizations should play a leading role and cooperate with a variety of other groups.

 

The last but not least theme is to accumulate various budget analysis cases from the gender perspective.

-Government budgets need to be analyzed from the gender perspective, in order to : 1) achieve the ultimate goal of gender budgeting. As Budlender (2005) said, the goal of gender budgeting is just not to take stock of government budgets from the gender perspective, but to mainstream the gender perspective into government policies, projects, and budgets to meet the different needs of men and women. Looking at the impact of fiscal projects on men and women would provide major information to improve government policies and systems; 2) diversify and deepen methods to analyze budgets by reviewing policies of various areas from the gender perspective and 3) use such analysis cases for training and advocacy materials on gender budgeting.

-We selected themes to conduct in-depth analysis at a workshop with experts from every related field. As for gender equality projects, we looked at budgets for childcare from the gender perspective and estimated social costs of domestic violence. As for general projects, we conducted seven case studies in the areas of labor, health care, industrial and local development and administration.