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Reflections and lessons learned

The main lesson from this exercise is that performing such impact analysis is possible in countries where data is available. Household level analysis can show impact on different types of households, and by gendered household type. It can give a measure of what is happening to standards of living. Individual analysis can be harder to do if the data isn’t available because it requires making assumptions about how income is shared within households. Individual analysis does not give a measure of standards of living, because it excludes public services, but it does give some measure of financial autonomy, associated with how much access individuals have to money of their own.

Such distributional analysis looks only at impact on the distribution of current income, or of living standards. Other inequalities that may be as important over a life course require different forms of analysis described elsewhere in this casebook.

This work received widespread media coverage and has been widely cited in the UK parliament. This shows that analysis of this type can be important for communicating the gender impact of policy to a wider audience.

The UK government has been reluctant to publish such analysis by gender and other protected characteristics. However, the publicly funded Equality and Human Rights Commission has published distributional impact analysis using the same model as WBG and has called on the government to carry out their own analysis.