Executive Summary. Gender Impact Report on the 2013 Budget of the Autonomous Community of Andalusia

The Gender Impact Assessment Report is one of the documents presented every year as an appendix to the Budget Law of the Autonomous Community of Andalusia. The report on the 2013 budget is the ninth in a series that began with the 2005 budget and therefore demonstrates the Andalusian government’s continuing commitment to equality between women and men.

Over the course of this decade, the Government of Andalusia has developed a systematic strategy for making gender equality a key focus of public spending. Thanks to the legal budgetary framework adopted and a structure that facilitates coordinated government action, equality between the sexes now forms part of an economic model based on the constitutional values of justice and equality.

The consolidated budget of the Autonomous Community of Andalusia for 2013 is 30.71 billion euros, which represents a 4.1% decline in relation to 2012. However, the budgetary programmes with the greatest capacity and responsibility for contributing to gender equality in other words, the G+ programmes have a greater weight in the overall structure of the 2013 budget than was the case in the 2012 budget, affecting 71.4% of the budget funds.

This relative increase reflects the Andalusian government’s pledge to maintain its social policies as a tool of  redistribution and a vehicle for promoting equality between citizens. Faced with the economic crisis, the  Government of Andalusia remains as committed as ever to steering public policy towards gender equality as a strategic investment in medium and long-term development.

The economic crisis must not be allowed to halt gender equality actions or reverse any of the goals achieved. In fact, public administrations have a responsibility to identify and analyse the possible erosion of social, economic and personal conditions and the different ways in which this affects women and men. The publication of this Gender Impact Assessment Report on the 2013 Budget of the Autonomous Community of Andalusia contributes to that process.

Furthermore, as reflected in the Global Gender Gap Report 2012 published by the World Economic Forum, the countries with the highest levels of economic and social development also have the highest levels of gender equality. Women potentially represent half of a country’s labour force, and since growth requires everyone to be economically active it naturally follows that development cannot be sustained if men and women are not equal. Given that nearly 60% of the university population are women, excluding increasingly skilled human resources is extremely inefficient.

The structure of the Gender Impact Assessment Report on the 2013 Budget repeats the format of previous years.

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