Abstract
Government budgets, Medium Term Programs (MTP) and Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) are all instrument to maintain the macroeconomic policies. Providing economic stability and economic growth can be seen as main goal of macroeconomic policies and SAPs, has become an essential tool for many countries to reach that goal. Gender responsive government budgeting has become an important aspect of budgeting for many countries in recent years. Gender responsive government budgeting is a gender sensitive budgeting that aims to provide equal distribution of public resources between men and women. Government budget is an important instrument to protect and improve the status of women, as a disadvantaged group, to compete fairly with men in every single stage of their life. The study analysed the current situation in North Cyprus by using recent financial protocols (Turkish structural adjustment programs: TSAPs) signed with Turkey and North Cyprus governments. Turkey has an important role as the provider of the needed financial source to North Cyprus budget and the TSAPs’ has an important impact on the budget policies. The study analyses the gender impact of the implementation of the TSAPS’ condition on public employment. This study will be a contribution to the literature as there is no related study that analyses the gender impact of Turkish SAPs. The study analyses gender impact of recent protocols starting from 2010-2012 by using public employment data as one of the available disaggregated data on gender.
The findings of the research reveals that the recent MTPs of North Cyprus are gender sensitive but TSAPs are gender blind. The implementation of the TSAPs’ public employment downsizing condition has a positive impact on female public employment share and women representation on public employment top and middle manager position (vertical gender segregation). On the other hand it has a negative effect on gender distribution among main public service employment categories (horizontal gender segregation).
Keywords: Gender equality, gender budgeting, structural adjustment programs, North Cyprus
MIRDEC 18th -Lisbon 2022, International Academic Conference on Economics, Business and Contemporary Discussions in Social Science, 4-6 July 2022, Lisbon, Portugal. Masters International Research & Development Center. www.mirdec.com CONFERENCE PROCEEDINGS: Full Paper Series LISBON 2022 ISBN: 978-605-74781-4-6.