April 1, 2008
Grown explores relationship between gender and taxation
UP_D08_518_011“All of the analysis just led back to the economics, to the fact that women did not have access to or control over income; they didn’t have any property; they were locked out of labor markets. I saw how economic policies clearly made a difference.” —Caren Grown
(Photo by Jeff Watts)
Tax codes may not be the sexiest front in the battle for gender equity, but few theaters are more important.
AU economist in residence Caren Grown first realized the important relationship between finance and gender while at a postgraduate internship at the United Nations.
“I was working on a conference that was dedicated to exploring the improvements in women’s status,” she says. “All of the analysis just led back to the economics, to the fact that women did not have access to or control over income; they didn’t have any property; they were locked out of labor markets. I saw how economic policies clearly made a difference.”
Grown quickly scrapped her plans for law school and started down an economics-centric path that has transformed her into one of the preeminent gender-aware economists. She arrived at AU in September 2007 from the Levy Economics Institute at Bard College. Previously she cofounded the International Working Group on Gender and Macroeconomics at the University of Utah. It was from that organization that her current project, Globalization, Gender and Taxation: Improving Revenue Generation and Social Protection in Developing Countries, was born.
She describes the research as, “A comparative project that is exploring the gender dimensions of tax policies and reforms across eight countries.” Those nations, selected for their differing levels of development and wealth, are South Africa, Uganda, Ghana, Morocco, India, Argentina, Mexico, and the United Kingdom.
The two-year project, due to be completed by the end of this calendar year, has several objectives, but one overriding one.
“All of the countries in the project are in the process of reforming their tax systems,” Grown says. “The goal is to analyze them [and] make recommendations to policy makers to make the structure of the taxes more gender equitable.”
Grown is heading the project with Imraan Valodia, a professor at the University of KwaNatal in South Africa. The two put together teams of tax economists, gender- aware economists, and lawyers in each of the countries. These contributors are studying several facets of their nation’s tax codes.
“We’re looking at specific types of taxes, like the personal income tax, to see whether there are any explicit provisions that might be biased against women,” Grown says. “This might be a rule in the tax code that allocates the structure of deductions or exemptions or credits to men instead of women. A tax system that might not treat women as an individual taxpayer, but as a dependent.”
Already, their research has uncovered some startling facts.
“We’re finding right now that there are explicit gender biases that exist in the tax systems of Morocco and Argentina,” she says. “Already our teams in these countries are thinking about recommendations for policy makers for reform of the personal income tax systems in both of those countries to rectify these kinds of biases.”
The project also aims to examine more subtle gender-biased portions of tax codes.
“One example is in tax systems where married people file jointly, often tax rates on secondary income are steeper than the tax rates on the primary income,” Grown says. “Most women earn less than men, and that’s true in every country in the world. That has been found to be a disincentive for married women to work, because their income is taxed at a higher rate.”
The teams will gather in Argentina later this year to report their findings, and each group will write a chapter in a book to be edited by Grown and Valodia and published next year.
“We see this as the first stage of what will be a longer-term project,” Grown says. “Our analysis at this point is at the level of households. We’re trying to develop a methodology . . . to see who within the household actually bears the burden. We want to extend our analysis to the impact of trade taxes. We’re interested in placing the analysis of the whole tax system in the context of globalization and the greater integration into world economies that these countries face.”
The public policy side of Grown’s work is complemented by its value in the classroom. Three of her students are research assistants, and her Gender Perspectives on Economic Analysis course discusses the project.
“I love academia, I love the world of teaching and doing research, but I’m keenly interested in public policy, and I’m always interested in translating what I know and learn into policy applications,” she says.
“I’ve become aware of the types of inequities that exist in the world along gender lines. One of my hopes is to make progress on improving the status of poor women or women who are marginalized or disadvantaged from mainstream resources. My research is aimed at uncovering these issues and hopefully leading to ideas that can be put into practice through policies and programs.
Here at AU I would like to see, by the time I retire, a generation of young economists who know how to do gender-aware economics, who know how to engender economic models, who know how to use empirical techniques to illuminate gender differences in economic problems, and who actually put those techniques and that knowledge to work in whatever jobs they do.”