Conference Agenda

Following COVID-19, the need for fiscal policies to fund gender equality has emerged as an important policy priority; however, the tools available to policymakers to support this effort remain limited. Recent assessments of national fiscal stimulus packages from a gender equality perspective point to the inadequacy of policy responses in addressing the immediate gendered impacts of COVID-19 as well as the resources needed to address systemic drivers of gender inequality. Estimates of public investment needs for investing in child-care and early education range from 3-5% of GDP in many low-income countries. Yet this does not even cover the entirety of investments needed for comprehensive care and social protection systems, nor are enough to mitigate other gendered impacts of the multiple current crises, including impacts in employment and real earnings.

Achieving equitable and sustainable economies will be unlikely unless there is a scaling up of investments towards gender equality. However, even where political will exists, limited fiscal space remains a practical constraint. The pandemic fueled a widespread debt crisis, with 60% of low-income countries and 25% of middle-income countries in or at risk of debt distress, with forecasts this debt will only deepen. Further, current frameworks for expanding fiscal space are either narrowly focused on efficiency and expenditure, do not take an explicit gender equality lens, or have not been revised to fit post-pandemic macroeconomic realities.

Therefore, there is an urgent need to identify strategies and policy measures for reclaiming fiscal space and amplifying them within countries’ existing fiscal space. A new conceptual framework that is grounded in feminist economics and which presents a ‘menu of options’ that consider the country context, enabling conditions as well as spill-over effects and trade-offs, will provide the basis for a practical policy tool on engendering fiscal space.

This roundtable will open a space to deliberate on the proposed elements of a new conceptual framework for engendering fiscal space. In doing so, it will provide a timely opportunity to re-examine the role of fiscal and monetary policy and identify practical prospects and levers for enabling the environmental and social investments needed for an equitable and sustainable world.