KWDI Korean Women’s Development Institute

2018 KWDI Abstract

 

Analysis and Assessment of National Gender Budgeting in Korea(Ⅳ)

 

Taek-Meon Lee

Sun-Joo Cho

Young-Sook Kim

Hyo-Joo Kim

Yoo-Jin Choi

Do-Yeon Kwon

Hae-Ram Kim

Ju-Hee An

Su-Ji Kim

 

The South Korean government adopts a performance-based budgeting system. Also, the government needs to manage its finance in a way to advance gender equality. It is thus essential for its ministries to be able to set gender equality objectives appropriate to their unique functions and well integrate the objectives into their existing performance-based budgeting system. To help meet the objectives, an assessment system for gender equality-related fiscal projects is necessary. The system needs to define appropriate assessment standards and have a feedback loop to reflect the results into the next fiscal year’s budgeting.

 

Considering this, this research is aimed at finding ways to revamp the South Korean government’s current gender budgeting system. To fully integrate gender budgeting into the current performance-based budgeting system, this research set forth the following recommendations. ① A long-term, in-depth study should be conducted to identify gender equality issues for each ministry by its responsible sector and area. ② Tasks that help resolve such-identified issues should be designated as gender equality objectives of the relevant ministry. ③ Projects that can contribute to the realization of the objectives should be newly designed or selected from the existing unit projects of each ministry and then designated as unit projects for gender equality. ④ Ministries’ performance of gender equality projects should be assessed using the existing fiscal project assessment system from a gender equality perspective and the results should be reflected into the implementation of the relevant project. This research’s recommendations go much beyond the simple preparation and submission of two types of statutory documents of gender budgeting and account settlement. The recommendations demand ministries to uphold a gender equality perspective in their performance management and performance-based budgeting that assess and provide feedback on fiscal projects. They also demand to consider the overall process of government’s fiscal management as a government-wide project that runs based on a gender equality perspective. When those recommendations come into effect, gender budgeting will become a major tool for gender mainstreaming that lives up to its name in the area of public finance.