The Impact of Gender Budgeting on Sectoral Allocations: Evidence From OECD Countries

Overview

Gender budgeting has spread across OECD countries over the past two decades, promoted as a tool for advancing gender equity through the budget process. Whether it changes how governments actually allocate money is far less settled; existing evidence is mixed, and most of it comes from single-country case studies. We examine a key precursor to broader equity outcomes: whether gender budgeting shifts budget allocations across sectors. Our analysis draws on panel data covering OECD countries from 2000 to 2023 and a stacked difference-in-differences design. We distinguish two treatments: the first year a country adopts any gender-budgeting initiative, and the first year gender budgeting becomes legally required through a constitution or organic budget law. Adoption alone is not associated with systematic shifts in sectoral allocations. Legal mandates are. Spending shares move toward health and social protection, the sectors prior work classifies as “feminine,” while defense declines in later years, consistent with a guns-versus-butter trade-off. Implementation depth, not adoption, is what converts gender budgeting from a stated commitment into a resource shift.

Research Design

• Data: OECD country panel, 2000–2023, at the general-government level
• Outcome: Share of total government expenditure by COFOG function; health and social protection classified as feminine sectors, defense and public order and safety as masculine sectors
• Treatments: (i) first year of any gender-budgeting adoption; (ii) first year gender budgeting is mandated by law, hand-coded from IMF, OECD, EU, and national sources
• Method: Stacked difference-in-differences with corrective weights (Wing et al. 2024)
• Samples: 23 adopter countries vs. 14 never-adopters; 12 legal-mandate countries vs. 25 controls

Key Findings

1. Adoption alone does not move budgets

• Countries that adopt gender budgeting without a legal mandate show little systematic change in sectoral allocations. Estimates for health and social protection are positive but modest—roughly 0.6–0.7 percentage points for health—and only marginally significant.

2. Legal mandates shift spending toward feminine sectors

• Once gender budgeting is embedded in law, the social protection share rises in the years following adoption (0.79 percentage points at t+1), with short-run gains in health as well.

3. Defense pays for part of the shift

• Defense spending declines by 0.58 percentage points four years after legal institutionalization, while public order and safety is unchanged. The pattern is consistent with a gradual guns-versus-butter reallocation rather than an across-the-board cut to masculine sectors.

Why legal mandates matter: overcoming decoupling

Public budgets are sticky; functional spending shares rarely move without a legal shock. A voluntary initiative is easy to decouple from practice: adopted on paper, set aside when priorities compete. A legal mandate instead builds gender analysis into the formal budget calendar, with defined responsibilities, regular reporting, and audit, which raises the cost of non-compliance and makes the reform hard to shelve.

Implications

• For governments: Adopting gender budgeting as a stated commitment is unlikely to change fiscal priorities on its own. Countries serious about equity-oriented reform may need to embed it in binding law, since voluntary guidelines and pilot programs remain vulnerable to political cycles and changing administrations.
• For theory: The findings move the literature from gender budgeting as process toward gender budgeting as resource-allocative reform, and they extend a lesson from the fiscal rules literature to distributional equity: rule-based institutions bite only when their design makes them legally binding.