Philippine Institute for Development Studies Surian sa mga Pag-aaral Pangkaunlaran ng Pilipinas
Policy Notes ISSN 1656-5266
No. 2005-08 (December 2005)
Gender differentiated benefit incidence of the Department of Education: basic education for all? Rosario G. Manasan and Eden C. Villanueva
efit incidence analysis of education can reveal disparities in the extent to which males and females, boys and girls benefit from public spending in education.
Who benefits from public spending in education?
T
he problem of access to education for children used to be seen as just a matter of building more schools to expand the number of available places and of recruiting and training more teachers. Nonphysical barriers, whether economic, social, political or cultural, were, on the whole, not quite understood at that time. It was not until 1990 when an international conference on Education for All (EFA) was held in Jomtien, Thailand that the international community fully realized that Universal Primary Education could never be achieved until the issue of girls’ underrepresentation in education was addressed (Leach 2003). In view of this, it is important to get a sense of the gender-specific distribution of benefits from government expenditures in education. In order to assess how public spending is being targeted and who benefits from it, benefit incidence analysis is a useful technique. Although government financing in education is assumed to be gender neutral, ben-
Based on the sex-disaggregated data on public school enrolment, Table 1 shows that more girls benefit from public secondary schools than boys while the opposite is true in public elementary schools. Since a bigger proportion of the Department of Education’s (DepEd) budget goes to the elementary level, on the whole then, a slightly higher proportion of the benefits of spending of the DepEd accrues to boys than to girls. It should be stressed, however, that while benefit incidence would show the distribution of the benPIDS Policy Notes are observations/analyses written by PIDS researchers on certain policy issues. The treatise is holistic in approach and aims to provide useful inputs for decisionmaking. This Notes is based on PIDS Discussion Paper Series No. 2005-16 titled “The impact of fiscal restraint on budgetary allocations for women’s programs” by the same authors. The authors are Senior Research Fellow and Senior Research Specialist, respectively, at PIDS. The views expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of PIDS or any of the study's sponsors.