Addressing Inequality in Budgeting
Lessons from Recent Country Experience
In many countries, public expenditure, including transfers, plays a major role in reducing income inequality. The report reviews the various ways that budgeting can be used to this end. A first includes taking a broad approach to results-based budgeting, taking social and distributional goals into consideration. A second relies on integrating distributional impact analysis directly into the budget process. The report discusses the concrete experience of eight OECD countries in this area, analysing how they are integrating distributional impact assessment in spending and budgeting decisions. Finally, it discusses the tools, frameworks and data that are needed to take distributional considerations into account as part of evidence-informed policy making.
Executive summary
Recent years have seen countries increasingly use their budgeting frameworks to achieve broader social and economic outcomes. Such cross-cutting challenges affecting various groups in society mean that an understanding of the underlying distributive implications of budgets is critical to ensuring that expenditure can be targeted and mobilised in the most effective way to achieve economic and social goals simultaneously in a context of severe fiscal constraints.
- Click to access:
-
Click to download PDF - 327.34KBPDF