For more than four decades, States have been meeting at the Regional Conference on Women in Latin America and the Caribbean to discuss and commit to eradicating discrimination against women and gender inequality and moving towards guaranteeing the full exercise of autonomy Women’s. The Regional Gender Agenda has included a series of commitments on fiscal matters, both in terms of spending and taxation. On these commitments, the main challenges of the region, the situation and the necessary reforms in tax matters, the presentation “The Montevideo Strategy and the Regional Gender Agenda, gender perspective in the region’s fiscal policy” by Nicole Bidegain Ponte addressed , Social Affairs Officer of the Gender Affairs Division of ECLAC, at the “Tax Systems and Gender Equity” Debate Forum, organized by the Federal Institute of Public Revenue Administration (AFIP) of Argentina on September 14 and 15 of 2022.
This forum was attended by authorities and professionals from the AFIP, the National Ministry of Economy and the National Tax Court, representatives of ECLAC, UN Women and the Spanish Institute of Fiscal Studies (IEF), and specialists from Argentina and international.
Nicole Bidegain referred to the main challenges in the region: low tax collection, regressive structures with implicit gender bias, high levels of evasion and avoidance, high tax exemptions and high public debt. Likewise, she pointed out that in 2022 fiscal revenues would begin to lose dynamism due to the slowdown in activity and consumption (within which some countries that export energy, minerals and agricultural products could have a less unfavorable condition).
The Social Affairs Officer also referred to the tax commitments included at the international level, in the Regional Gender Agenda and in particular in the Montevideo Strategy. Since the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action in 1995, commitments have been included in relation to taxation, which also occurred as part of the regional agreements in the meetings of the Regional Conference on Women, both in the Brasilia Consensus in 2010 as in the Consensus of Santo Domingo in 2013. In the Montevideo Strategy of 2016, the States agreed to design and evaluate fiscal policies (income, expenses and investment) from a gender perspective. In this sense, he explained, they committed to mobilizing the maximum available resources, promoting progressive fiscal policies and allocating budgets with a gender focus to guarantee resources for public policies aimed at reversing gender inequalities and guaranteeing women’s rights. They also committed to carrying out gender impact studies on fiscal policies, ensuring that they do not have explicit or implicit negative effects on gender equality; and expand collection at the highest levels of income and wealth and strengthen regional cooperation to combat evasion and avoidance in order to have more resources for gender equality policies (see measures 5.a, 5.c, 5 .g and 5.h of the Montevideo Strategy).
The presentation also emphasized the need to generate fiscal pacts that guarantee the rights of women in the framework of a transformative recovery. In terms of fiscal income, said Nicole Bidegain, it is necessary to mobilize additional public resources and increase the progressivity of the tax systems through the consolidation of direct taxes, wealth taxes and extraordinary profits; reduce evasion and avoidance through multilateral tax cooperation agreements (for example, promoting a global minimum in corporate taxation); evaluate tax expenditure and review gender bias in tax structures; and increase access to international financing. In this sense, he highlighted the proposal to deduct expenses in care of the tax reform project in Chile, and the progressive tax reform of this project and elements of the tax reform in Colombia, which may have the potential to reduce inequalities in income. gender in relation to income and wealth.
Finally, the Social Affairs Officer made a call to participate in the XV Regional Conference on Women in Latin America and the Caribbean, which will take place from November 7 to 11, 2022, in Argentina, whose central theme will be “The care society as a horizon for a sustainable recovery with gender equality in Latin America and the Caribbean.” In this framework, issues related to the economic autonomy of women, fiscal policy, financing of care and cooperation to combat avoidance and evasion, among others, will be addressed.
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Presentation “The Montevideo Strategy and the Regional Gender Agenda, gender perspective in the fiscal policy of the region”.
