"All Decisions Are Top-Down:" Engendering Public Expenditure in Vietnam

Haroon Akram-Lodhi

Feminist Economics, 2002, vol. 8, issue 3, 1-19

Abstract: 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 unquantifiable 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.

Keywords: Public Expenditure; Taxation; Public Economics; Gender Budgets; Vietnam; Gender Economics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2002
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0003684022000026647 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:femeco:v:8:y:2002:i:3:p:1-19

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/RFEC20

DOI: 10.1080/0003684022000026647

Access Statistics for this article

Feminist Economics is currently edited by Diana Strassmann

More articles in Feminist Economics from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().