Feminist Economics 8(3), 2002, 1–19

“ALL DECISIONS ARE TOP-DOWN:”

ENGENDERING PUBLIC EXPENDITURE IN VIETNAM A. Haroon Akram-Lodhi

A B S TR A C T Between October 1999 and June 2000 a joint government–donor working group undertook a public expenditure review in Vietnam that was supposed to use “gender issues” as a cross-cutting theme. The article discusses ways in which a gender analysis could have been incorporated into a review of public expenditure, and examines why this did not happen in the end. Flaws in the process reduced the scope of gender analysis. Institutional constraints on the part of both the government and the World Bank weakened the commitment to a gender analysis. More fundamentally, however, it is argued that the methodological approach of the World Bank rendered it incapable of investigating possibly unquantiŽ able macrostructural and mesoinstitutional determinants of individual behavior. It is further argued that the conceptualization of social institutions offered by the World Bank with regard to gender relations fails to adequately express the extent to which social institutions are gendered.

K E Y W O RD S

Public expenditure, taxation, public economics, gender budgets, Vietnam, gender economics

I N TR O D UC TI O N : T H E V I E T N A M P U B L I C E X P E N D I T U R E RE V I E W Between October 1999 and June 2000, the World Bank, the government of Vietnam, and a small group of bilateral donors collaboratively undertook a public expenditure review in Vietnam (Government of Vietnam–Donor Working Group on Public Expenditure Review [PER] 2000a, 2000b). Such reviews, or PERs, are useful tools for the World Bank to help “countries establish effective and transparent mechanisms to allocate and use available public resources in a manner that promotes economic growth and helps in reducing poverty” (World Bank 2000: 1). The Vietnam PER nonetheless differed from other such exercises in one ver y particular way: it was

Feminist Economics ISSN 1354-5701 print/ISSN 1466-4372 online © 2002 IAFFE http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/0003684022000026647

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supposed to investigate “gender issues” in public expenditure in Vietnam (PER 2000a: 33). However, in doing this, the Vietnam PER clearly failed; in the main report only 3.5 percent of the text was devoted to gender analysis. In this article I will explore the reasons for this failure. Two broad themes stand out in the Vietnam PER. The Ž rst concerns public expenditure management (PER 2000a: ii–iv). The PER found that government revenue and expenditure as a share of GDP was declining. It recommended that this decline be reversed, in order to fund anti-poverty programs as well as to accommodate additional spending pressures that would emerge from planned economic reforms in state-owned enterprises and the banking sector. The PER accompanied this recommendation with a call for the development of a medium-term Ž scal outlook to complement both the annual budgetary process and the Ž ve-year plan, in order to reduce Ž scal risk. In addition, the PER made recommendations to improve the recording and reporting of data, to increase the transparency of data and information, and to reŽ ne the prioritization of expenditures. The second set of themes concerned public expenditure policies and was based upon sectoral analyses contained in the latter half of the PER (PER 2000a: ix–xii). Here, the PER argued in favor of improving the “pro-poor” bias in public expenditure, in particular by reallocating health and education spending and by improving the processes governing cash transfers to poorer provinces. It also argued in favor of reallocating intra-sectoral spending in order to improve outcomes in health and education. Finally, it argued that the government should closely examine services currently provided by the public sector, to determine which ones might be better provided by the private sector, reducing both the burden on the budget while at the same time enhancing the efŽ ciency and equity of service delivery. As already mentioned, the Vietnam PER differed from other such exercises in a speciŽ c way: it had a mandate to investigate “gender issues” (PER 2000a: 33). That gender should be examined within the context of a PER might seem obvious. There is now some acceptance of the proposition that the macroeconomic context within which expenditure, taxation, and budgetar y decisions are made can have “gender dimensions” (Nilufer Cagatay, Diane Elson and Caren Grown 1995; World Bank 2001: 270). Indeed, the two key reasons cited to justify the economic case for public intervention – market failure and redistribution – can both be the outcome of the structure of gender inequalities (A. Haroon Akram-Lodhi 2000a). For example, factor markets – and not just labor markets – are commonly segmented on the basis of gender, while the distribution of income and the distribution of wealth are usually gender differentiated within and between households. Gender inequalities can thus affect aggregate investment, aggregate production, and economic growth, and can lead to suboptimal outcomes (Lucia Hanmer, Graham Pyatt, and Howard White 1997). Therefore, a PER-type exercise should, as a matter of course, take into account the 2

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effects of gender inequalities on the efŽ ciency and equity of public spending. The investigation of “gender issues” in the Vietnam PER resulted from the efforts of a bilateral donor interested in facilitating gender “mainstreaming” in development cooperation. In this instance, the donor sought a better understanding of how gender relations in Vietnam structured decision-making in public expenditures. To that end, the donor sought to have gender integrated throughout the PER, as a cross-cutting issue. Yet the effort was futile; in the Ž rst volume of the Vietnam PER, only three pages out of eighty-Ž ve are devoted to “gender issues,” and the word “gender” appears only Ž fteen times. At Ž rst glance, it might be difŽ cult to reconcile the fact that gender was to be an integral cross-cutting issue in the PER with the limited amount of space it received. However, such a Ž nal result was, in many respects, not surprising. A cursor y glance at the macroeconomics sections of any major economics textbook will reveal no references to gender relations, demonstrating that, for many economists, macroeconomics and the theor y of public Ž nance are gender neutral. Clearly, the gender analysis of macroeconomics is an issue for only a limited audience. In this light, the Vietnam PER offers an interesting case study of the theoretical and practical issues involved in integrating gender relations into macroeconomic analysis in general, and into public expenditure analysis in particular. In this article, I investigate how and why gender relations became such a limited component of the Vietnam PER, and I examine the lessons of the PER for the gender analysis of public expenditure issues in Vietnam. T H E G E N D E R B U D G E T S A P P R O A C H A N D TH E AN A L Y S I S O F P U B L I C E X P E N D I TU R E A generally accepted starting point for conducting a gender analysis of public expenditure is the gender budgets approach (Debbie Budlender 2000). The gender budgets approach seeks to increase the gender sensitivity of “budget processes and allocations so as to improve women’s access to resources and government services” (Debbie Budlender and Rhonda Sharp with Kerri Allen 1998; World Bank 2001: 269). The bulk of the work done on the gender budgets approach has focused on gender inequalities at the microeconomic and sectoral levels, probably because changing policies and priorities at these levels can signiŽ cantly reduce gender inequity (United Nations Development Programme 2000). Nonetheless, researchers have also undertaken conceptual and empirical work that seeks to integrate gender into macroeconomic analysis (Cagatay, Elson, and Grown 1995; Caren Grown, Diane Elson, and Nilufer Cagatay 2000). Such work has attempted to integrate gender into the appraisal of the composition of government spending and taxation, the effectiveness 3

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of public expenditure policies, and into budgetar y strategies (Diane Elson 1998). These insights suggest that Ž ve key issues require investigation if a systematic evaluation of the gender sensitivity of the state budgeting and spending process is to be undertaken (Commonwealth Secretariat 1999; UNIFEM 2000). It is therefore worth examining each of these areas in turn. Public expenditure incidence analysis The Ž rst area deals with the recipients of public spending. Gender-speciŽ c or equal-opportunities public expenditure constitutes a small fraction of total public spending in most countries (Budlender and Sharp with Allen 1998). However, it is obvious that typical public-spending policies – which are not gender speciŽ c and do not promote equal opportunities – do not necessarily beneŽ t men and women equally. That such is the case severely complicates the analytical issues raised in a gender analysis of public expenditure. For example, women in public sector employment in Vietnam often experience better terms and conditions than do women working in the private sector; no such discrepancy exists for men. In this sense, public spending has a differential impact upon women and men. Analytically, this should be taken into account when examining, for example, the reform of state-owned enterprises, because such a differential impact can affect intrahousehold relations and other aspects of gender relations. Similarly, in Vietnam, men participate in relatively more capital-intensive activities than women do; thus, the investment bias that is found within the Vietnamese budgetary process (A. Haroon Akram-Lodhi 2000b) is an example of indirect gender bias. Again, subsidies have differential effects on men and women, depending on which prices and which goods and services are affected, and these effects must be evaluated from a gender perspective before advocating, say, the elimination of a particular subsidy in, for example, agriculture. It is well established that public service deliver y can affect the unpaid economy, and in so doing affect gender relations within the household. For example, in Vietnam the introduction of user fees in the deliver y of health care has resulted in a marked increase in self-diagnosis and treatment, tasks which are predominantly done within the household by women (Tran Tuan 2001). Finally, transfer payments from the government to individuals, which in Vietnam are often a legacy of war, affect the unpaid economy and in so doing gender relations. For example, the payment of a pension to a war veteran and the payment of a pension to a war veteran’s surviving spouse will in general have gender-differentiated effects, because they will use their pensions differently. Transfers should therefore be distinguished along gender lines. Gender budget analysis therefore seeks to undertake an incidence analysis that focuses upon nongender-speciŽ c, nonequal opportunities public 4

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spending, using gender as the key variable (Lionel Demer y 1997; Elson 1998). Linking public-spending data with household survey data can help create this incidence analysis, making it possible to assess the distribution of the beneŽ ts of public expenditure by gender.1 Public-expenditure incidence analysis is now a reasonably well-established domain of investigation in public economics. While the costs of such analyses and the data problems that can arise in undertaking them should not be minimized, it is technically feasible to conduct public expenditure incidence analysis that is gender aware, especially when a measurement survey of living standards is available. Public revenue incidence analysis The second area analysts should investigate for gender differentials is the Ž nancing of public spending. Direct taxes have a greater impact upon men because of their wider access to paid employment and hence to earnings (Isabella Bakker 1994: 27; Elson 1998). In contrast, indirect taxes have a greater impact upon women because of their traditional roles as managers of household maintenance activities and hence of the household consumption budget. Finally, wealth taxes derive from unstated assumptions about family structures and property relations within households, and in particular that resources are equitably distributed between males and females. There is thus a need, when evaluating public expenditure, to decide on whom the burden of taxation lies, and in so doing to evaluate the gender equity of taxation structures. The procedure is analogous to that used for public expenditure incidence analysis, in that public revenue data needs to be linked to household survey data. However, this is more complex, given the difŽ culty of dividing collective tax payments made by the household among the individuals within it. Nonetheless, such an area of investigation is important in Vietnam, as impressionistic evidence suggests that user fees and voluntary contributions, in health and in education in particular, have gender-differentiated impacts, with men and women being responsible for different types of tax payments. Gender-disaggregated beneŽ ciary assessment The third area of investigation should be to evaluate budget priorities and public service deliver y from the standpoint of the intended beneŽ ciaries (Elson 1998). Given that men and women may not have the same views on budget priorities and public service deliver y, such beneŽ ciary assessments should be disaggregated on the basis of gender. As noted, impressionistic evidence from Vietnam suggests that user fees and voluntary contributions in public services, in particular, are not gender neutral. This is not just because of the distributional impact of these revenues but also because the 5

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behavioral impact of user fees and voluntary contributions may be gender-differentiated, resulting in such services being received unequally. If these methods of revenue raising are not gender equitable, either in how the revenues are collected or in how recipients perceive they are awarded, it is unlikely that men and women would, as intended beneŽ ciaries, assess public revenue acquisition and expenditure uniformly. At the very least, this would have implications for the analysis of the equity of public expenditure. The impact of public spending on time use The fourth area of investigation should assess the impact of public expenditure on the gender division of labor (Elson 1998). The available evidence in Vietnam suggests that, as elsewhere, women work consistently more than men at each point in the life cycle (National Committee for the Advancement of Women [NCFAW] 2000), in particular by spending almost twice as much time as men in household maintenance activities ( Jaikishan Desai 2000: 19). The gender division of labor thus constrains women from taking advantage of economic opportunities beyond the household. This has been termed the “reproduction labor tax” (Ingrid Palmer 1995): women supply their labor to household maintenance activities at no cost, which affects the allocation of resources by imposing a constraint upon the participation of women in other activities beyond the household. The revenue and expenditure activities of the state can alter this constraint, by tightening or loosening it (Lucia C. Hanmer and A. Haroon Akram-Lodhi 1998). This suggests, in turn, that public expenditure affects time use, and such effects require investigation. Articulating gender concerns Undertaking a successful gender-aware analysis of the budgeting process requires conducting gender-aware policy analysis and appraisal. This is the Ž fth issue that needs to be addressed in the gender budgets approach (Budlender and Sharp with Allen 1998; Elson 1998). Budgetary decision making is inherently political in nature. As such, it is fanciful to believe that the decision-making process is gender neutral. Rather, the role of the state in the budgetary decision-making process can have a profound effect upon material and behavioral gender inequity (Rhonda Sharp and Ray Broomhill 1990; Hanmer and Akram-Lodhi 1998). Therefore, researchers must Ž rst assess the extent to which gender concerns have a “voice” in the policy process. A focus on the gendered outcomes of spending, while very important, is, at best, a limited means to evaluate policy from a gender perspective. There is a more fundamental need to create a gender-aware policy analysis that examines both the inputs and the outputs of public expenditure and revenue-acquisition policies. 6

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In response, advocates of the gender budgets approach have developed a set of integrated tools that can be used to undertake an analysis of public revenue and expenditure decision-making at a macroeconomic level. Granted, some feminist economists believe that such an approach requires too much work to describe an existing situation without dealing with the issues that are central to women’s lives. However, public-spending and revenue-acquisition policies affect intra-household relationships, access to factor and product markets, income levels, and social well-being. These are central issues. Thus, were a gender budgets exercise to be conducted in Vietnam, it would make an extremely helpful contribution toward public understanding of the gender-disaggregated impact of public spending and taxation policies. The PER was the Ž rst attempt at conducting such an exercise in Vietnam, albeit in a limited fashion, but the Ž nal result was, to put it mildly, extremely disappointing. It is to explaining this outcome that the article now turns. G E N D E R A ND TH E V I E T NA M P E R Gender and the PER process The Vietnam PER was to provide a cross-cutting analysis of the impact of gender on public spending and taxation policies. However, while the Vietnam PER brought together three sets of participants – namely the government of Vietnam, the World Bank, and other members of the loosely afŽ liated Consultative Group of bilateral and multilateral donors for Vietnam – gender analysis did not motivate the bulk of the participants. Only one bilateral donor and a few individuals within the government expressed interest in exploring a gendered analysis of public expenditure. They proposed this analysis to the Bank, which responded favorably to the willingness of the bilateral donor to fund the work. However, even at the earliest stages of the PER process, Bank ofŽ cials seemed unclear about what constituted “gender issues” in public expenditure, other than clearly important but ultimately partial gender-disaggregated outcomes of sectoral public spending in areas such as education and health (World Bank 1999a: 6). Moreover, the gender-disaggregated outcomes of sectoral public spending are somewhat “soft” issues for “an organization giving strong analytical and policy priority to economics” (Ann Whitehead and Matthew Lockwood 1999: 528). Realizing this, the donor stated that while the sectoral outcomes of public spending were important, a thorough gender analysis of public expenditure should have a broader canvas, examining macroeconomics from a gender perspective. With this intervention from the donor, the Bank recognized the need to analyze gendered aspects of public expenditure processes. However, this recognition was vague, suggesting that ofŽ cials continued to misunderstand the interface between gender analysis and the macroeconomics of public 7

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expenditure (World Bank 1999b: 7). This lack of understanding was compounded when, because of a managerial oversight, none of the consultants working on the PER were instructed to conduct gender analyses in their areas of expertise. As a result, a gender consultant Ž nanced by the donor interested in gender was asked by the World Bank to produce a report that would encompass both the sectoral and the process analysis. This report became the basis of the “gender issues” section of the PER. As a consequence, despite the efforts and resources of the donor, an approach to “gender issues” emerged that emphasized the sectoral outcomes of public spending and, to a much lesser extent, gendered processes. However, by the time the PER was made available to the Consultative Group, the World Bank staff that were the writers of the report had reduced even this to a short text that summarized gender-based differences solely in the outcomes of public expenditures. The “mainstreaming” of gender analysis sought by the donor had been turned on its head; “gender issues” had become a sideline. Gender, institutional constraints, and the Vietnam PER Undertaking a gendered PER in Vietnam was never going to be easy. The government was poorly equipped to carr y out such a PER, and its inability to do so was reinforced by inattentiveness of the lead multilateral agency, the World Bank, to the implications of committing itself to a gender analysis of public expenditure and revenue policies. The capacity of the government to undertake a gender analysis of public expenditure policies was constrained by weaknesses in the formal policyreview process. First, within central ministries and provincial departments that formulate public revenue and expenditure priorities, there are Committees for the Advancement of Women (CFAWs). The CFAWs, which are supposed to monitor and appraise policy for its impact on women, are the closest approximation of a government agency concerned with gender relations. In practice, however, the CFAWs merely monitor programs targeted at women; they do not review policy for its impact on women. The National Committee, in theor y, coordinates the CFAWs. However, most CFAWs have minimal capacity – they are underresourced, understaffed, and in some instances do not even have women in senior positions. As a consequence, the potential roles of the CFAWs as advisory centers are compromised. Indeed, they are not even able to properly monitor programs targeted at women. Second, within the bodies of elected representatives that must ultimately approve public revenue and expenditure priorities, there are, at various levels, women’s committees. However, these committees have no voice in economic affairs. Rather, they can share responsibility for “softer” social-sector and cultural issues, such health and the media. Within the 8

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Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV), the women’s committee also has responsibility for social-sector and cultural issues. It does not review and evaluate the impact of economic decision-making upon women or upon gender relations. This means that members of the party who seek to articulate gender concerns in economic policy-making can only do so through personal networks. Finally, the largest mass organization in the country, the Vietnam Women’s Union (VWU), has no institutional means to comment upon, let alone review or revise, state revenue and expenditure policies. It can in uence policy only through its connections to government or to the CPV, connections that are based upon personal relationships and are therefore, at best, a ver y indirect means of in uencing budgetar y processes. Vietnam therefore lacks institutional structures within ministries, within bodies of elected representatives, and within mass organizations that can monitor, evaluate and, if necessary, compel revisions of budgetar y decisions because of their impact on the structure of gender relations. Indeed, in Vietnam, “all decisions are top-down” (World Bank 1999c: 57). Senior leaders within the Politburo of the CPV, none of whom are women, set the strategic direction for policy and decide much of the broad detail of public expenditure. These decisions are transmitted through the OfŽ ce of the Government, which is run by the Prime Minister, a man. In fact, the OfŽ ce of the Government formally makes most decisions, including quite minor ones, after agreement is reached by the Politburo of the CPV. Vietnamese governance is ver y hierarchical, and this hierarchy serves to limit the extent to which the impact of policy on gender relations is evaluated. Of course, Vietnam is not unique in this respect. Formal institutional structures to monitor and evaluate the impact of budgetary processes on gender relations are, by and large, lacking elsewhere in the world; where such structures exist, they have resulted from extensive interventions by civil society (Commonwealth Secretariat 1999). In Vietnam, constraints on the development of civil society mean that only concerned individuals can monitor the impact of policy interventions on the structure of gender relations. The lack of institutional capacity in the Vietnamese government was compounded by the inattention of the World Bank to the implications of conducting a gender analysis of public expenditure. These problems persisted despite the efforts and resources of the donor and some interested individuals within government. In considering why efforts for a gender analysis failed, the Ž rst point that should be made is that those creating the PER had opportunities to gain knowledge of the gender budgets literature. At the beginning of the PER, those directly involved with it were probably unaware of the gender budgets literature; however, they had ample time to explore it, and the donor interested in gender did offer suggestions for reading and research. Moreover, with regard to public-revenue incidence analysis, the PER does suggest that incidence analysis be the subject of further research. Granted, the incidence analysis that it recommends does 9

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not deal explicitly with gender. Rather, it deals with poverty, in order to assess the extent to which government spending is “pro-poor.” However, an analysis of the poverty impact of the budget would be inadequate unless it were gender aware. The clear failure to acknowledge this simple point demonstrates not a lack of knowledge but a lack of attention to the details needed to develop a gender analysis within the PER. Another example of this lack of attention to details is the issue of data and their availability. It is true that the information available in Vietnam at present does not allow for a proper economic analysis of the budget, let alone a gender analysis of the budget. It therefore seems reasonable that, at some point in the PER, its framers would recommend gathering the information necessar y to facilitate a proper gender analysis of the budget. Such a recommendation is not strongly made. Even so, more information is available than is generally supposed; the Vietnam Living Standards Survey (VLSS) of 1998 (General Statistical OfŽ ce 1999) contains a wealth of information that can be used to undertake parts of a gender budget analysis. In addition, some data were gathered for the PER. In Quang Binh province and Cu Chi district, Ž eldworkers asked members of the people’s committees, as elected representatives of intended beneŽ ciaries, to evaluate budget priorities and public service deliver y. Fieldwork was also conducted on the impact of user fees and voluntary contributions on household budgets, and this can be considered a form of beneŽ ciar y assessment. Both sets of Ž eldwork could have been used to provide the data for a gendered beneŽ ciar y assessment, but this was not done. Indeed, it is not clear whether any women were consulted in these evaluations. As a result, the Ž eldwork undertaken for the PER makes no attempt to understand how men and women might view the costs and beneŽ ts of public spending differently. Thus, while data for a gender analysis of public revenue and spending priorities are inadequate, important opportunities, in the form of the VLSS and the Ž eldwork, were missed. The PER, and its principal author, the World Bank, thus demonstrated a singular lack of attention to the use of information that was either available or was acquired during the PER and that could have been used for an elementary gender analysis of macroeconomic policy. The Bank also failed to acknowledge which additional information would be desirable if a proper gender analysis of the budget was to be undertaken. As a consequence, the actions of the Bank served to reinforce the lack of capacity within government. This signiŽ cantly contributed to the marginalization of gender analysis within the Vietnam PER. Gender, economic methodology, and the Vietnam PER The Vietnam PER does not offer a gender analysis of public expenditure. Rather, it offers a cursory analysis of the gendered outcomes of public 10

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expenditure, two sentences on the relationship between gender and the budgetary process, and nothing at all about the macroeconomic impact of gender relations. In order to construct a possible explanation of why gender was relegated to near irrelevance in the PER, it is necessary to make some preliminary observations. The PER offers an analysis conducted at three levels. The Ž rst level, the macroeconomic, examines aggregate spending and taxation. The second level is the mesoeconomic, which examines spending allocations to sectoral ministries and the impact on the operation of markets. The third, or microeconomic, level examines the outcome of spending on households and individuals. Within the PER, the attention given to gender is conŽ ned to the microeconomic level, in its emphasis on the gendered outcomes of spending in the agricultural, health, and education sectors. While understanding the gendered outcomes of sectoral spending is clearly important, it results in “gender as a policy criterion [being] interpreted as an instrument for achieving . . . goals” (Frank Ellis 2000: 139). In order to understand how gender became relegated to an instrument, it is necessar y to understand why it became equated with the outcomes of sectoral spending. The PER emphasized the gendered outcomes of sectoral spending for both theoretical and empirical reasons. Theoretically, it is often difŽ cult to precisely trace the impact of macroeconomic decisions on individuals. Households mediate the relationship between interventions and outcomes, and understanding the basis by which the mediation is conducted is essential if the identiŽ cation of individual beneŽ ts from public spending is to be made. Understanding how the household mediates the beneŽ ts of public spending is, however, conceptually difŽ cult (Lawrence Haddad, John Hoddinott, and Harold Alderman 1997; Hanmer and Akram-Lodhi 1998). This difŽ culty leads many analysts to bypass tricky theoretical questions altogether. Instead, they emphasize empirical descriptions of the gendered outcomes of public spending. Such descriptions obviate the need to understand the basis by which the household mediates public spending  ows, since the beneŽ ts of such spending can be directly traced to the individual who appropriates it. For this reason, then, health and education outcomes are commonly favored in an analysis of “gender issues” such as that undertaken in the PER: it is comparatively easy to evaluate differential enrollment rates, or differential clinic contact rates, or the like. However, the emphasis that many analysts place on identifying the individual appropriation of the beneŽ ts of public spending may be, to a degree, a misreading of the issues involved in the gender analysis of public spending. This misreading, in turn, may be a function of the orthodox economic methodology used by institutions such as the World Bank. Many if not most working economists, at the Bank and elsewhere, engage in what might be termed “pragmatic empiricism.” In their work, they deŽ ne a set of dependent and independent variables, obtain the data, and then test for 11

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the strength of the association between the variables. The strength of the association is presumed to provide information about the relationship between the variables, even though it does not and indeed can not provide any information about the causes of the statistical relationship. The pragmatic-empiricist approach to social theory denies the possibility of macrostructural determinants of individual behavior, because such macrostructural determinants are, at best, difŽ cult to quantify or are, at worst, difŽ cult to translate into reasonably precise concepts that can in turn be quantiŽ ed. A prime candidate for the category of macrostructural determinant would be class (A. Haroon-Akram 2001); so too would be gender relations. Both are exceedingly difŽ cult to quantify precisely. The pragmatic approach also fails to properly appreciate the diverse ways in which mesoeconomic institutions can structure individual behavior (A. HaroonAkram 2000c), and thus tends to reify microeconomic outcomes. In effect, pragmatic empiricism holds that if phenomena cannot be quantiŽ ed they are, at best, of limited analytical use. In other words, only that which can be measured is of use to the policy-maker. A striking example of this mind-set is found in the background papers for the policy research report, Engendering Development (World Bank 2001). Of the Ž fteen working papers prepared for this report, only one did not use a “pragmatic empiricist” methodology. Surely, however, an emphasis on quantiŽ able phenomena as the only analytically useful variables is deeply misleading. Just because something is not measurable does not mean that it does not structure human behavior. Indeed, this is a key difference between scientiŽ c inquir y and social theory. Missing, difŽ cult-to-quantify variables can structure the behavioral patterns of dependent and independent variables. In a variety of branches of social theor y, such variables may indeed provide the pivotal associative link between the dependent and the independent variables. However, such variables are not important to a particular branch of social theor y, namely neoclassical economic theor y. At the same time, an emphasis on microeconomic outcomes offers, at best, an extremely partial vision of gender and economics. Gender not only affects outcomes; it also structures the decision-making processes that result in those economic outcomes. Moreover, such decision-making processes are not conŽ ned to households. They also occur in other social institutions: in markets, in sectoral ministries, and in the focal decision-making centers of government. In other words, gender analysis cannot be conŽ ned to the microeconomic; it must also encompass the mesoeconomic and the macroeconomic, even if the linkages among the three areas may be difŽ cult to conceptualize theoretically (Diane Elson, Barbara Evers, and Jasmine Gideon 1996). That the World Bank as an institution does not fully grasp the implications of the impact of gender relations on economic theory is demonstrated in Engendering Development (World Bank 2001). At the beginning of this report, the authors correctly stress that gender 12

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refers to socially constructed roles and socially learned behaviors and expectations associated with females and males. Women and men are different biologically – but all cultures interpret and elaborate these innate biological differences into a set of social expectations about what behaviors and activities are appropriate, and what rights, resources and power they possess. (World Bank 2001: 2) This suggests a need to examine the broader environment in which gender relations unfold. In the following passages, the authors have no difŽ culty identifying two critical institutions that shape gender identities. Households play a fundamental role in shaping gender relations . . . and in transmitting these from one generation to the next. . . . How tasks and productive resources are allocated among sons and daughters, how much autonomy they are given, whether expectations differ among them – all this creates, reinforces, or mitigates gender disparities. (World Bank 2001: 13–14) Markets and hierarchies . . . have sets of rules governing transactions and in uencing decisionmaking about consumption, savings, investment, work, and reproduction. . . . [T]hey re ect prevailing social norms and customs, including gender structures that discriminate against women. (World Bank 2001: 124) That households and markets are gendered is widely accepted within social theory, but it is nonetheless important that a report by the World Bank recognizes these assumptions – especially regarding markets. However, what of that other key economic institution, the state? Here the authors are less forthright, stating policies . . . need to consider and address prevailing gender inequalities in rights, resources and voice. . . . [A]ctive policies and programs are needed to redress long-standing disparities between women and men. (World Bank 2001: 15) This statement is disingenuous, as it suggests that the World Bank bases its actions and programs on the theory that the state is a benign tool that can be directed by civil servants whose only interest is to promote the common good. However, “[state] funds are allocated by individuals whose social identities shape their perception of priorities” (Nancy Folbre 1997: 271). Clearly, the theory of the state adopted by the World Bank is blind to the implications of social identity on decision-making, and as such, the Bank’s theor y of the state serves to marginalize gender. Of course, this bias is not 13

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surprising. The Bank is a multilateral organization that is supported by states. Be that as it may, the state, like the household and the market, is the product of a particular histor y, and as a product of a particular history it may be built in such a way that systematically disadvantages certain groups. As a consequence, the state can be, as the product of a particular, speciŽ c, history, “gendered.” In particular, public institutions often privilege certain kinds of skills and abilities over others, and in so doing they constrain the opportunities available to individuals. State spending, which also privileges certain skills and abilities, shapes the operation of markets and the decisionmaking processes of households. For example, state spending can reinforce or reduce the constraint on individuals imposed by the gender division of labor (Hanmer and Akram-Lodhi 1998). However, the relationship between state spending and households is nonlinear: households mediate relations between public interventions and outcomes, effectively constraining the power of public interventions to shape those outcomes. The association between gender relations and the social institutions of state, market, and household is thus a dynamic, interactive relationship ( Jane Wheelock 1996). A gender analysis of public expenditures in Vietnam or elsewhere therefore requires recognition that individual behavior is affected by macrostructural determinants and mesoeconomic institutions. These determinants may be material, or they may be ideological. A gender analysis also requires study of the gendered character of institutions such as the household, the market, and the state. It further requires that the possibility of con ict and asymmetrical beneŽ ts should be set alongside the possibility of consensus and symmetrical beneŽ ts. However, these requirements are incompatible with the methodological individualism that guides most economists, including those employed by the World Bank. Therefore, the PER was unable to undertake such an analysis, and as a result could not provide a gender analysis of public expenditure processes. Moreover, the unwillingness of the Bank as an institution to recognize the theoretical limits of its approach demonstrates, at least implicitly, a less than wholehearted commitment to the embedding of gender analysis within the institution. As Ellis has recently noted (2000: 139): the development profession has found it much easier to assimilate gender through its links to other development objectives than to challenge directly the social and institutional mechanisms by which gender inequities are perpetuated over time. Despite protestations, the World Bank has not placed gender relations at the center of its economics, which is the most important area of its policy analysis and advice. As a result of this failure, the Vietnam PER provided only a set of quantiŽ able outcomes of public spending, outcomes that were 14

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by and large already known. In consequence, the PER failed to generate any new information regarding gender relations in Vietnam. T H E L E S S O N S O F TH E V I E T NA M P E R The failure of the Vietnam PER to offer a gender analysis of public expenditure and taxation policies nonetheless indicates how a gendered analysis of public economics can be developed in that country. First, ofŽ cials need to establish institutional mechanisms that develop an ongoing dialogue between senior ministries and, at the very least, organizations that represent women. For example, the Ministry of Planning and Investment and the Ministry of Finance, the two key budgetar y ministries, need to enter into a dialogue with a strengthened NCFAW, strengthened sectoral CFAWs, and the VWU. Only then will gender concerns have a “voice” in the inherently political and thus gendered policy process, and will gender-aware policy proposals be developed. In addition, in Vietnam the gender analysis of public spending and taxation policies could be promoted through the development of two important institutional mechanisms that would overcome the institutional constraints already noted. First, the government should require the Ministry of Planning and Investment, the Ministry of Finance, and the sectoral ministries to submit policy proposals to a gender committee with the power to review a proposed policy in light of concerns regarding gender impact. In other words, proposals should be subjected to a “gender audit” analogous to an environmental impact audit. Second, a budgetar y submission process should be created, one that would be independent of government and that would permit both the VWU and NCFAW to make gender-aware budgetary submissions embodying policy proposals to the government. Both suggestions would have the effect of replacing the role of concerned individuals within government with formal institutional structures. Of course, in order for such structural mechanisms to work, the VWU and NCFAW, for example, would need to increase their capacity to carr y out a gender analysis of the budget. Indeed, even if the proposed structures were unacceptable, capacity building in the gender analysis of the budget would be on its own a powerful recommendation for enhancing the role of gender analysis in the consideration of budgetary issues. Government acceptance of such a recommendation would contribute to the articulation of a “voice” for gender concerns in Vietnam. However, promoting the creation of a space for the articulation of gendered “voice” in the Vietnamese budgetar y process does not deal with the other problem that hampered the PER. The pragmatic empiricism of the World Bank rendered it incapable of investigating possibly unquantiŽ able macrostructural and mesoinstitutional determinants of individual behavior. Indeed, the Bank analysts’ conceptualization of social institutions and 15

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gender relations fails to adequately express the extent to which social institutions, and in particular the state, are gendered. The inability of the Bank to recognize these issues demonstrates a lack of effective, embedded institutional commitment to gender analysis, a demonstration that is clearest in the failure of the Bank to consider the implications of gender analysis for orthodox neoclassical economic theor y. It is not surprising, then, that the gender analysis of the Vietnam PER is as weak as it is. Clearly, there is a need to promote the development of heterodox analyses within the Bank if the gender awareness of exercises such as the Vietnam PER is going to be improved. CO NCLUSION In Vietnam, “all decisions are top-down.” This means that the Politburo of the CPV, which is largely composed of men, sets the strategic direction for policy and decides much of the broad detail of public expenditure and revenue decisions. These decisions are transmitted through the OfŽ ce of the Government, which is run by the Prime Minister, a man. “Top-down” also means that these decisions are implemented by central and sectoral ministries, whose CFAWs lack the capacity to monitor the impact of budgetar y decisions on gender relations. These ministries pass on instructions through layers of government, where the representation of women is less than that at the central level, and where the capacity to monitor public spending for its effect on gender relations is nonexistent. Finally, “topdown” means that in afŽ rming budgetary decisions, elected representatives do not devote sufŽ cient time to a gender analysis of those decisions. In short, Vietnam has a hierarchical structure of governance, one which, in effect, assists in reproducing the ideological and material subordination of women to men in Vietnam. By not analyzing this structure, the ways that gender relations affect the public expenditure process, and the ways that nongender-speciŽ c, non-equal opportunities public expenditure can bear the biases of gender relations, the authors of the Vietnam PER and those individuals and organizations that have accepted its Ž ndings are, to a degree, complicit in this structure of subordination. A. Haroon Akram-Lodhi, Institute of Social Studies, PO Box 29776, 2502 LT The Hague, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] A C KN O W L E D G M E N T S A preliminary draft of this article was written for distribution at the International Workshop on Gender Auditing of Government Budgets, Commissione Pari Opportunità, Presidenza del Consiglio dei Ministri, Rome, 16

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Italy on September 15–16, 2000. My thanks to Francesca Bettio and Annalisa Rosselli for inviting me to the workshop. Thanks also to Debbie Budlender, Jaiki Desai, Diane Elson, Sue Himmelweit, Mia Hyun, Susan Johnson, Pamela Reid, Jill Rubery, Ardeshir Sepehri, Rhonda Sharp, and Tosca Bruno-van Vijfeiken for comments on the Ž rst draft of the article. The comments of four anonymous referees are acknowledged with thanks. While the research for the article has been Ž nanced by the Royal Netherlands Embassy in Hanoi, Vietnam, the arguments contained within it remain those only of the author, who is solely responsible for the contents of the article. NOTE 1

Following completion of the PER, the United Nations Development Programme in Vietnam produced guidelines for linking public spending and household survey data. These guidelines provide a basis upon which a gender budgets analysis can be conducted in Vietnam (United Nations Development Programme 2001).

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Elson, Diane. 1998. “Integrating Gender Issues into National Budgetary Policies and Procedures: Some Policy Options.” Journal of International Development 10: 929–41. —— and Nilufer Cagatay. 1999. “Engendering Macroeconomic Policy and Budgets for Sustainable Human Development.” Presented to the First Global Forum on Human Development, New York, July 29–31. ——, Barbara Evers, and Jasmine Gideon. 1996. “Concepts and Sources.” University of Manchester Genecon Unit Working Paper No. 1, November. Folbre, Nancy. 1997. “Gender Coalitions: Extrafamily In uences on Intrafamily Inequality,” in Lawrence Haddad, John Hoddinott, and Harold Alderman (eds.) Intrahousehold Resource Allocation in Developing Countries: Models, Methods and Policy, pp. 263–74. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. General Statistical OfŽ ce. 1999. Vietnam Living Standards Survey 1997–98. Hanoi: General Statistical OfŽ ce. Government of Vietnam–Donor Working Group on Public Expenditure Review (PER). 2000a. Vietnam: Managing Public Resources Better – Public Expenditure Review 2000. Volume 1: Main Report. Hanoi: Vietnam Development Information Center. ——. 2000b. Vietnam: Managing Public Resources Better – Public Expenditure Review 2000. Volume 2: Annexes. Hanoi: Vietnam Development Information Center. Grown, Caren, Diane Elson, and Nilufer Cagatay. 2000. “Introduction to Growth, Trade, Finance and Gender Inequality.” World Development 28(7): 1145–56. Haddad, Lawrence, John Hoddinott, and Harold Alderman (eds.). 1997. Intrahousehold Resource Allocation in Developing Countries: Models, Methods and Policy. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Hanmer, Lucia C. and A. Haroon Akram-Lodhi. 1998. “In ‘The House of the Spirits’: Towards a Post-Keynesian Theory of the Household?” Journal of PostKeynesian Economics 20(3): 415–34. ——, Graham Pyatt, and Howard White. 1997. Poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa: What Can We Learn from the World Bank’s Poverty Assessments? The Hague: Institute of Social Studies Advisor y Services. National Committee for the Advancement of Women (NCFAW). 2000. Situation Analysis and Policy Recommendations to Promote the Advancement of Women and Gender Equality in Viet Nam. Hanoi: NCFAW. Palmer, Ingrid. 1995. “Public Finance from a Gender Perspective.” World Development 23(11): 1981–6. Sharp, Rhonda and Ray Broomhill. 1990. “Women and Government Budgets.” Australian Journal of Social Issues 25(1): 1–14. Tran Tuan. 2001. “The Health System in Rural Vietnam: Community-Based Evidence and Comments.” Presented to the National Economics University-Institute of Social Studies Seminar Series in Development Economics, Hanoi, December 4. United Nations Development Programme. 2000. Gender-Sensitive Budgets. On-line. Available http://www.undp.org/poverty/resources/gender_budgets.htm ( January 2000). ——. 2001. Ministry of Finance Public Expenditure Review Phase II. On-line. Available http://www.undp.org.vn/projects/vie96028/index.htm ( June 2001). UNIFEM. 2000. “Gender-Sensitive Budget Initiatives for Latin America and the Caribbean: A Tool for Improving Accountability and Achieving Effective Policy Implementation.” Presented to the 8th Regional Conference on Women of Latin America and the Caribbean, Lima, Peru, February 8–10. Wheelock, Jane. 1996. “People and Households as Economic Agents,” in Maureen Mackintosh, Vivienne Brown, Neil Costello, Graham Dawson, Grahame Thompson, and Andrew Trigg (eds.) Economics and Changing Economies, pp. 79–112. London: International Thomson Business Press.

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Whitehead, Ann and Matthew Lockwood. 1999. “Gendering Poverty: A Review of Six World Bank African Poverty Assessments.” Development and Change 30(3): 525–55. World Bank. 1999a. Vietnam Public Expenditure Review: Concept Paper (Draft Outline). Hanoi: The World Bank. World Bank. 1999b. Vietnam Public Expenditure Review: Concept Paper (Draft) 30 October 1999. Hanoi: The World Bank. World Bank. 1999c. Voices of the Poor. On-line. Available http://www.worldbank.org.vn/ rep5/voice.pdf ( July 2000). World Bank. 2000. Product 1: Public Expenditure Reviews (PERs). On-line. Available http://www1.worldbank.org/publicsector/pe/p1pers.htm ( July 2000). World Bank. 2001. Engendering Development: Through Gender Equality in Rights, Resources and Voice. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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