An empirical assessment of the effectiveness of gender budget initiatives on women’s political empowerment

ABSTRACT After the adoption of gender budget initiatives in Australia in 1983, over seventy countries aiming to improve women’s political empowerment introduce gender budget initiatives to engender policies. However, the relationship between gender budget initiatives and women’s political empowerment has not been examined thoroughly and empirically. This article assesses the influence of gender budget initiatives with panel data about 173 countries from 1980 to 2016. Using panel data fixed effects models, this article finds that the introduction of gender budget initiatives improves women’s political empowerment. This link is consistently robust in a lagged dependent variable (LDV) model specification. Moreover, the estimated average treatment effects (ATEs) and average treatment effects on the treated (ATETs) of gender budget initiatives on women’s political empowerment also support the efficiency of gender budget initiatives. This article contributes to the literature on gender budget and women’s empowerment by testing the general impacts of gender budget initiatives on women’s political empowerment with time-series cross-national data.