Gender budgeting and economic development an inter state analysis

Abstract

Owing to the enormous extent of gender inequality in India, as indicated by India s rank in UNDP s Gender Inequality Index and Gender Development Index, it is very unlikely that the gender disparity will disappear on its own. In lieu of this, India adopted Gender Budgeting in 2004-05 as one of the measures to enhance the development of women and thereby reduce gender inequality. Gender Budgeting aims at examining budgetary resource allocations to ascertain their gender-specific impact. The present study seeks to assess the impact of Gender Budgeting on the development of women across 27 Indian states over 2004-05 to 2020-21. The analysis has been done using balanced Panel data regression technique. For a comprehensive measurement of development of women across the Indian states the study constructed a consolidated Index of Women s Development (IWD) based on the PQLI methodology by taking into consideration various indicators of development like education, Health and Empowerment. Fixed and Random effect models were applied followed by Hausman Test for selection of appropriate model. Owing to the presence of cross-sectional dependence, heteroskedasticity and autocorrelation final results were derived using Panel Corrected Standard Errors (PCSE) technique. Based on the results it was concluded that Gender Budgeting has a positive and statistically significant impact on the development of women thus the study suggests its integration into the budgetary process of the government. newline