Gender Sensitive Budget: the Dominican Experience

This article focuses on the government budgetary allocation in the Dominican
Republic using a gender-based analysis. The need to integrate gender into
government budgets and public policies, especially in the macroeconomic
ones, has been widely demonstrated by several studies on the unequal impact
of structural adjustments on women and men. Women are often those who
have the greatest responsibilities for care work, and furthermore the division
of the economy into productive and reproductive sectors is based on gender.
The first part of this article illustrates the methodology and instruments used in order to analyze and identify the unequal gender impact of the public
expenditure, and it shows some Latin American and Caribbean experiences of
gender-sensitive public budget. Analyzing experiences from the Dominican
Republic, the paper concludes that resources allocated to the Women’s
Ministry and to the Gender Equity Office are very little due especially to
the lack of political will. Although the analysis of the categorization of
expenditures in the Ministry of Education, Labor and Women shows some
positive signs, further study is needed.