Introduction: Six themes and key recommendations for embedding gender equality, care, and climate in fiscal policy

This compendium consolidates thirteen cross‐country analyses, case studies, and thematic briefs that examine how innovations in public finance and climate adaptation finance can promote the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)—with a particular focus on gender equality (SDG 5). Together, the contributions argue that fiscal policy, domestic resource mobilization, and climate finance must be reframed to better support progress toward equality. Investments in “social infrastructure,”¹ defined as investment in human capabilities, alongside investment in climate-resilient physical infrastructure, progressive tax reforms, and inclusive governance, are presented as essential tools for building more resilient and equitable societies.

The volume is intended for ministries of finance, revenue authorities, and sectoral agencies to link financing with development strategies by aligning tax and spending policies, while advocating for more integrated approaches that recognize care and climate investments as key drivers of development rather than as marginal costs. Several essays challenge dominant fiscal narratives, urging policymakers to rethink the ambition to tax the informal sector, expose the political choices often masked by technical fiscal language, and question whose interests are served by fiscal rules and debt servicing priorities. Some essays address budget classifications that undervalue social investments in care services, health, and education by treating them as current rather than capital expenditures. The chapters largely concentrate on research on low-income and emerging-market economies.

The sections that follow draw on these insights to identify six core themes emerging from the contributions and offer recommendations for policy change and future research. These emphasize the need for transparency, accountability, and participation in implementing reforms and highlight the co-benefits that link care services, climate action, and gender equality. The chapters in this compendium argue that gender equality policy objectives should be considered through a holistic approach to fiscal policy at the country level in order to be more impactful. This involves connecting taxation to expenditures through both technical measures and political will to achieve a country’s gender equality policy goals. It also means reconsidering fiscal space and the fiscal rules that parameterize fiscal policy. A holistic approach to fiscal policy requires a different public finance paradigm: specifically, rethinking the standard notion of fiscal space, away from narrow financial criteria to incorporating broader economic criteria; revising fiscal rules; and reforming tax and budget processes to enable low and lower-middle-income countries to prioritize the size and composition of spending that addresses the long-term needs of society.

A new paradigm for fiscal space

As Kharas explains, not all expenditure impacts fiscal space equally. Conventional wisdom may view transfers—such as livelihood subsidies in response to crises or natural disasters that compensate for losses—as spending that does not foster long-term growth, therefore diminishing fiscal capacity. Another perspective, however, is that such transfers constitute investment in repairing social and physical infrastructure, in the absence of which growth would be lower. Other expenditures, which have high social returns—such as public spending on health, education, and care services for children—also expand fiscal space in the medium term by indirectly increasing revenue through higher gross domestic product (GDP) and tax buoyancy, thereby leading to reduced net fiscal costs.

Onaran and Oyvat show evidence that expenditures on social protection and care services yield large fiscal multipliers that expand fiscal space; these expenditures pay for themselves over time through higher revenues due to increases in national income. Their macroeconometric modelling across eight emerging economies and the United Kingdom suggests that a one-percentage-point annual increase in spending on care services and care infrastructure, at the end of five years, raises GDP on average by about 11%, employment by 6%, and yields cumulative GDP multipliers (over the five years) ranging from 1.6 to 4.5, depending on the country.² Given its strong multipliers and long-term productivity effects, the authors argue that public spending on care should therefore be regarded not as current expenditure but as public investment in social infrastructure, which requires patient capital and potential borrowing if necessary.³ This also entails revisions to fiscal rules and budget processes to promote a transition toward long-term strategic planning rather than imposing inflexible short-term constraints on public budgets.

A holistic approach to embedding gender equality objectives in fiscal policy: Connecting revenue and expenditure

Most countries have not yet adopted a holistic approach to gender equality in the context of fiscal policy, including in the country cases discussed in this compendium. There is significant potential to improve the design and implementation of tax and spending systems, making them more progressive, efficient, and effective for women and men. Abramovsky and Granger note that fiscal incidence analysis across countries shows that, in most systems, tax and spending taken together reduce both within-country inequality and inequality between women and men. As they explain, not every tax and spending policy should address gender gaps directly, but policies need to complement one another to ensure a more equitable, efficient fiscal system as a whole.

Grown and Mascagni (2024) elsewhere describe the elements of a holistic approach for embedding gender equality objectives in fiscal policy: It would consider not only the design of various policy measures, but also administration and capacity issues of the relevant tax and budget authorities, fiscal politics, and gendered social norms.⁴ Research on gender and fiscal policy has largely concentrated on the design of tax and expenditure policies but has paid less attention to the other dimensions of fiscal policy, which is a contribution of this compendium. The chapter by Abramovsky and Granger provides a good summary of the types of tax and benefit policies that reduce gender inequality and support women’s ability to participate in paid employment and enable men and women to balance work and family.

The administrative capacity of countries to implement progressive and equitable tax policies has begun to receive more attention in recent years. Some studies have focused on both collection and enforcement issues, as well as on the compliance behavior of men and women taxpayers.⁵ In this compendium, Komatsu points out that in some types of tax regimes, for instance, in the administration of presumptive taxes, enforcement may be unevenly applied. She emphasizes that complexity and ambiguity in the rules of these tax regimes burden subsistence-level firms, many of whom are women-led, rather than high-income operators. The chapter by Gallien and van den Boogaard notes that imposing taxes on the informal sector frequently yields minimal revenue, does not enhance collection efforts, and imposes burdens on informal workers and traders, predominantly women. This links to the argument by Grown and Mascagni (2024) that constraints or barriers to tax compliance—for example, where tax offices are difficult to reach or payment needs to be made in person—are more likely to present challenges for women than men, in part due to mobility constraints or care-giving responsibilities. Some governments have begun to pay attention to these constraints and are piloting reforms, including one-stop shops for business registration or digitization of tax payments, which could improve the ease of tax administration.⁶ This is an area ripe for further experimentation and research.

While this compendium does not address the capacity of national and local governments to translate public expenditure into effective delivery of public services,⁷ several chapters address how gender budgeting initiatives can help improve the effectiveness of public expenditure. Chakraborty emphasizes that institutionalizing gender budgeting within ministries of finance and within legal frameworks enhances transparency, accountability, and sustainability. Additionally, she notes that outcome-based monitoring of gender budgeting, as opposed to simply tracking financial inputs, can further improve effectiveness by narrowing the gaps between allocations and actual expenditures. Tribin and Reyes describe the Colombian experience to emphasize that expenditure, rather than taxation, may serve as a more efficacious instrument for closing gender disparities and establishing a robust system of care services.

A recent strand of the literature has identified the role of fiscal politics as the missing link between taxation and expenditure.⁸ The compendium’s chapter by Mascagni and Grown points out that calling for greater domestic revenue mobilization alone is not a guarantee of better outcomes for women. The additional revenue needs to be used to increase public spending in ways that close gender gaps. The reason lies in the overlooked role of fiscal politics that mediates between revenue and expenditure. Gender equality politics, for instance, influence the distribution of resources, in such areas as reproductive and maternal health, childcare, women’s entrepreneurship, and domestic violence prevention and response, among others. Their chapter lays out a framework for understanding fiscal politics in the specific context of governments’ decisions about revenue and spending to advance gender equality or in the context of rolling back women’s rights.

Enhancing progressivity and minimizing regressivity in tax systems

The chapter by Abramovsky and Granger lays out the elements of a tax system that balances the objectives of equity and efficiency. They note that expanding the revenue base requires the implementation of measures that are part of the standard tax policy toolkit, such as strengthening the progressivity of personal and corporate income taxes, treating different types of labor and capital income equally for tax purposes, broadening the value-added tax (VAT) base, and introducing taxes on wealth and property. Evidence shows that comprehensive and progressive personal income tax systems—those that tax all forms of labor and capital income equally—are more effective at reducing gender gaps than dual systems that favor capital income.⁹ Moreover, broadening VAT bases and using targeted cash transfers instead of poorly targeted exemptions—such as those for menstrual hygiene products—can make indirect taxes fairer and promote gender equality.¹⁰ Well-designed wealth taxes—even in lower-income countries—can diversify revenue sources while ensuring that high-net-worth individuals contribute their fair share.¹¹

Many low-income countries view taxation of informal enterprises and self-employed individuals as an important source of revenue, despite evidence to the contrary.¹² Even as countries pursue informal taxation, the contributions to this compendium illustrate pragmatic ways to reduce regressivity and the burden on low-income women entrepreneurs. Two compendium chapters (one by Komatsu and another by van den Boogard and Gallien) focus on simplified tax regimes and presumptive taxes. Simplified taxes are special systems for business income designed to broaden the tax base for small and micro enterprises. They are introduced to generate revenue (replacing corporate income, personal income taxes, and VAT), reduce compliance costs by minimizing reporting obligations, and promote formalization through tax registration of informal firms. In sub-Saharan Africa, where the majority of small enterprises and self-employed entrepreneurs operate informally, and women own a significant proportion of these enterprises, approximately 65% of tax authorities utilize such regimes.¹³ Both Komatsu and van den Boogard and Gallien provide empirical evidence that these regimes often yield limited revenue and impose burdens on low-income entrepreneurs and subsistence traders due to complex regulations, arbitrary enforcement, and multiple local fees and levies. For instance, in Kenya, the turnover tax accounted for only 0.002% of GDP.¹⁴ At the same time, due to the misalignment between filing and reconciliation procedures, it imposed significant costs on microbusinesses, predominantly owned by women.

Simple changes can be made to avoid over-taxing the informal sector and improve these systems for advancing income and gender equality. Revenue authorities can start by simplifying tax structures—limiting differentiated rates and reducing the number of simplified tax regimes. Komatsu suggests that minimum exemption thresholds can be established and indexed to inflation, so subsistence-level, often women-led, firms are not taxed. Thresholds and rates can be coordinated with VAT and personal and corporate income taxes to avoid distortions and to encourage transition to the regular tax system. She argues that eligibility criteria should clearly state which taxpayers and activities qualify and exclude professionals capable of using the regular income tax system. Investment in taxpayer education and digital services, including streamlined registration and filing, as well as targeted education programs, as implemented in Rwanda, can improve compliance. Gallien and van den Boogard emphasize that authorities can harmonize and simplify subnational taxes and fees, strengthen the coordination between national and local authorities, and ground reforms in the lived experiences of taxpayers to reduce burdens on informal operators, especially women operators.

Public investment in care services

A fourth theme of this compendium is how to use the fiscal system to finance the provision of universal care services. Public investment in universal care services is central to achieving gender equality, adaptation to climate change, job creation, and economic growth. A large literature emphasizes the centrality of care to all these issues.¹⁵

Financing care services and infrastructure can be done through several channels, including moving toward a more progressive tax system and the adoption of taxes on wealth, as recommended by Onaran and Oyvat, as well as Abramovsky and Granger. Afful-Mensah and Oduro argue that more effective property taxation that is visibly directed toward public services, including water and sanitation, reduces the unpaid labor of women and children. Miluka recommends closing regressive VAT exemptions and strengthening property and carbon taxes, which can free up revenue for care services and infrastructure. Tribin and Reyes propose a different route in Colombia, where care is a national policy priority, but allocations and expenditures for care services are not publicly available. Thus, they suggest making budgeting practices more transparent. Without a system that tracks spending and outcomes, along with enhanced transparency in public finances, governments at all levels will be incapable of effectively planning or overseeing investments in care services.

Expenditure switching is another way to free resources to invest in care services.¹⁶ Eliminating fossil fuel and other subsidies that primarily benefit special interests has growing support as an approach to redirect resources to social objectives, including care.¹⁷ Abramovsky and Granger emphasize that the elimination of regressive subsidies, along with well-designed social expenditures, including cash transfers, particularly when targeted at individuals rather than households, is generally progressive and effective in alleviating low-income women’s unpaid work burdens.

Aligning domestic public finance and climate adaptation finance

The fifth theme underscores the need to align climate adaptation finance and public development finance to build resilience, reduce poverty, and advance gender equality. Public climate finance is still mainly designed in isolation from broader development finance objectives. Embedding these streams of finance into a more holistic approach will be more effective and efficient. Heckwolf and Soubeyran point out that climate funds, adaptation planners, and finance ministries can coordinate to better design fiscal instruments that incorporate social equity into climate-related revenue and expenditure policies, while progressively eliminating inefficient expenditures—such as fossil fuel subsidies—and reallocating the savings toward renewable energy, poverty reduction, and care services infrastructure initiatives.

Heckwolf and Soubeyran provide two examples of how this can be done. Ireland’s carbon-pricing program earmarks revenues for social-welfare payments and retrofitting initiatives, demonstrating that carbon taxes can support just-transition measures and protect low-income households where women predominate. Morocco’s fuel subsidy reforms redirected billions of dollars toward solar and wind projects. With the range of jobs created, being more deliberate about embedding targeted measures to improve women’s employment can exemplify how subsidy savings can support inclusive transitions.

As noted above, while public investment is necessary to build a universal care system, climate adaptation finance also has a role to play. One currently unrecognized feature of climate adaptation is that comprehensive care services—encompassing early childhood care and education (ECCE), health care, and long-term care—are themselves a climate adaptation strategy as they strengthen preparedness and response efforts to climate hazards. The Grown et al. chapter points out that, at both national and local levels, adaptation and disaster risk plans frequently reference health and education, but they rarely address early childhood care and education or long-term care. As a result, they overlook the costs of interventions that could strengthen support for paid care workers and unpaid caregivers and fail to incorporate essential facilities such as day care centers and nursing homes into adaptation strategies. Only a few cities, such as Quezon City in the Philippines, are beginning to recognize caregivers as front-line responders to climate hazards and integrate them into emergency planning.¹⁸

Aligning climate adaptation and public development finance to support care services infrastructure requires coordinated training programs for both paid care professionals and unpaid caregivers, inclusive planning through local care councils and participatory workshops, and investment in structured planning frameworks, digital technologies, and administrative capabilities. Climate finance can overlay a care lens in development finance efforts to adapt physical infrastructure where care services are provided, including retrofitting buildings and integrating green and nature-based solutions such as shade trees, urban gardens, and greenways.

Strengthening capacity for a holistic approach to embedding gender equality in fiscal policy

A final theme reinforces earlier research calling for strengthening tax and benefit administrations and capacity at the national and local levels.¹⁹ Three types of actions to build capacity stand out. The first is collecting and curating timely, sex-disaggregated data from surveys and administrative records to capture the full scope of gendered economic gaps, inform more equitable fiscal policies, improve administrative capacity, and enhance tax compliance. Combining household, labor force, tax, and expenditure beneficiary data provides a more complete national picture; however, many low- and middle-income countries still lack such coverage. Abramovsky and Granger discuss the type of sex-disaggregated data that are necessary to assess the cumulative effects of taxes and transfers and further elaborate country-specific fiscal incidence analyses and microsimulation models. Such analyses will inform trade-offs among redistribution, incentives, and economic growth.

Patel and Chakraborty note that gender responsive budgeting exercises can move toward a more outcome-oriented approach, which also requires sex-disaggregated administrative and survey data. Creating dedicated budget lines relies on this type of information. Similarly, monitoring and evaluation of expenditure relies on ex post impact assessments and tracers that link resource allocations to outcomes to promote accountability and transparency. 

Third, multilateral development banks, United Nations agencies, climate funds, and bilateral donors can better coordinate at both national and local levels by pairing concessional financial support with practical technical assistance to finance ministries and revenue and planning ministries where their impact is most significant. At the local level, Patel recommends that these international partners allocate resources through performance-based intergovernmental transfers and dedicated “locally led adaptation and care” funds, which enable municipalities and community organizations—particularly women’s groups and informal-worker associations—to access support directly. On regional and global scales, they can promote tax cooperation and facilitate peer learning on topics such as wealth and property taxation, as well as simplified regulatory frameworks. Furthermore, support can be provided for debt-for-care and debt-for-climate swaps when considered appropriate.

Conclusion

Over the next decade, advancing the interconnected goals of gender equality, climate resilience, and inclusive development requires more than incremental reforms—it demands a decisive move to a new fiscal paradigm. This involves considering gender equality policy objectives through a more holistic lens, which includes connecting taxation and expenditure, reclassifying care and climate expenditures as productive investments, revising fiscal rules to allow borrowing for high-return social infrastructure, and linking progressive taxation to visible improvements in services. Countries can overcome governance challenges by collecting timely sex-disaggregated data, strengthening transparency, improving tax compliance, and embedding an outcome-oriented gender budgeting approach. Aligning adaptation finance with development priorities—such as universal care systems and just transition policies for climate change mitigation—will be key to ensuring that climate action directly supports poverty reduction, equity, and resilience.

Shifting to a new fiscal paradigm raises several areas for future work, including questions about which institutional and administrative arrangements work best for connecting taxation and expenditure decisionmaking processes and results in countries at different levels of development; how to overcome political obstacles to implementing progressive tax regimes; and changing mindsets that gender equality issues are marginal to fiscal policy reforms. These questions underscore that implementation of the policy recommendations outlined in this compendium is only the beginning of a new frontier. The ongoing challenge for policymakers, researchers, and advocates is to anticipate subsequent obstacles and opportunities for fiscal policy to be reoriented to sustainable development.