Indirect Taxation And Gender Equity: Evidence From South Africa

This paper explores the equity implications of indirect or consumption taxes from a gender perspective, using detailed expenditure data for South Africa. While a growing literature on the incidence of indirect taxes investigates their impact on the income distribution in developing countries, there is little work on whether indirect taxes have differential gender outcomes. Gender bias is likely to exist in taxes that are levied on consumption expenditure, because men and women (and their households) spend their incomes on different types of goods, or on goods that are taxed differently. To estimate the gender incidence of indirect taxes, this paper explores differences between households that are classified as more 'Female' or more 'Male' according to their demographic and economic attributes.