Challenging Gender Inequality in Tax Policy Making: Comparative Perspectives

Description

This volume takes a critical look at the gender of tax policy around the world. Contributors based in eight different countries examine the profound effects that gender norms and practices have had in shaping tax law and policy, and how taxation in turn impacts upon the possibilities for equality along gender, race, class, sexuality and other lines. Chapters explore how the gendered fiscal state might be theorised; how structural choices about rates and bases in tax policy design contribute to gender inequality; how tax policy affects family configurations and perceptions of what constitutes family; how fiscal systems impact on savings and wealth accumulation by women and men; and the role of different policy-making processes and institutions in occluding and sometimes challenging these patterns. Most significantly, perhaps, the book explores these questions in an international frame, traversing countries and continents. The conclusion: fiscal policy has deep rooted, long standing gender implications that affect virtually every aspect of our social, political, and economic lives whether we live in Canada, Australia or Kenya.

Kim Brooks is the Dean at the Schulich School of Law at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada. Asa Gunnarsson is a Professor at the Department of Law of Umea University, Sweden. Lisa Philipps is a Professor at Osgoode Hall Law School of York University, Toronto, Canada. Maria Wersig is a doctoral candidate at the Otto Suhr Institute of Political Science, Freie Universitat Berlin, Germany.

This collection of essays is part of an important project: bringing together critical gender analysis to the study of tax policy. It is also tantalizing in the opportunities it suggests for collaboration between those writing from within the crit tradition and empirical tax scholars to identify the effects of tax policy reforms on women's opportunities, welfare, autonomy, and capabilities. -- Andrew Hayashi * Law and Politics Book Review, Volume 23, No.3 *