5 Gender in Public Expenditure Reviews

There are strong reasons to believe that a lessening of gender inequality is important in the promotion of economic growth and in the reduction of poverty (Murphy 1997; Blackden and Bhanu 1999, Presser and Sen 2000). A reduction in gender inequality, especially in its more extreme forms, is also desirable from a human rights prospective. The World Bank's Public Expenditure Reviews (PERs) offer a potentially important opportunity to further the reduction of gender inequality. The PER process might be used to advocate the desirability of making more room in the country's budget for programs that would promote women's employment, health, education, safety, productivity in t he home and in the formal and informal economy. It might also promote a greater devotion of the country's revenues to ostensibly gender-neutral infrastructure, such as piped clean water, that would make household operation, and therefore women's lives, easier. Obviously, the easiest way to convey what a useful gender analysis under the PER process might look like would be to point to a good model. In a number of countries, both developed and developing, and in a number of international organizations, the idea of gender-sensitive budget analysis has been taking shape. The country documents that have been produced under this rubric (called " gender budgets, " and in some cases, " women's budgets ") are not fully fledged alternative versions of their countries' budgets. Rather they are mostly descriptions from a gender perspective of a more-or-less selective set of