South Korea's Gender-Responsive Budgeting under the National Finance Act

South Korea's National Finance Act (enacted 2006) requires the central government to prepare an annual Gender Budget Statement and Gender Budget Balance Sheet alongside the national budget. Mandatory implementation began at central-government level in 2010 and was extended to local governments in 2013.

According to UN Women's Asia-Pacific regional report, the gender-responsive share of the national budget rose from 3.7% in 2010 to 7.4% in 2017; by the government's own reporting to the UN CEDAW Committee in 2024, the gender-responsive budget had reached approximately USD 17.3 billion, roughly 3.2 times its 2010 level. At the same May 2024 CEDAW review, committee experts nonetheless raised concerns about South Korea's persistent gender wage gap, underlining that budget growth alone has not closed underlying disparities.

Peer-reviewed research (Journal of Public Budgeting, Accounting & Financial Management, 2023) documents real implementation challenges: integrating gender objectives into the performance-budgeting framework has proven burdensome, some public officials have resisted the process, and a separate study of municipal governments found substantial variation in how seriously local authorities applied gender budgeting after the 2013 mandate. South Korea therefore offers both a well-evidenced legal model and an honest cautionary lesson: statutory mandates do not guarantee uniform follow-through.

Read the full analysis: https://www.ohchr.org/en/meeting-summaries/2024/05/experts-committee-elimination-discrimination-against-women-commend-0