Lisa Philipps

Discursive Deficits: A Feminist Perspective on the Power of Technical Knowledge in Fiscal Law and Policy

Decisions about taxation and government spending have great political significance: they affect the distribution of income and wealth and the nature and degree of class, gender and other social inequalities. However, tax and budgetary issues are frequently constructed as technical matters that can be resolved rationally according to economic, mathematical or other ostensibly neutral principles. The author examines the debate around budget deficits and recent sex equality challenges to the income tax system, and argues that both illustrate how technical discourses tend to deny the normative content of fiscal law and policy and to disqualify political opposition to the prevailing fiscal order as irrational, ideological and inexpert. The paper concludes by examining the discursive strategies of feminists and others interested in fiscal change. The author considers how feminists might respond to, and even harness, the power of technical knowledge in struggling for tax and expenditure reforms while also challenging the oppressive features and depoliticizing tendencies of such discourses.

Silent partners: The role of unpaid market labor in families

Abstract The term “unpaid market labor” refers to the direct contributions of unpaid family members to market work that officially belongs to another member of the household. Thus one individual may be construed legally as an owner or entrepreneur, but relatives may help out informally with business operations. Likewise, in corporate or public-service settings, certain employees rely on the unpaid help of an executive spouse or political wife. This paper argues that unpaid market labor is conceptually distinct from both paid work and unpaid domestic labor. Legal cases from Canada are used to illustrate the policy implications of this insight and how dichotomous thinking about the market and the family obscures this kind of work. The article discusses insights and challenges for feminist political economy in theorizing unpaid market labor.

Taxing the Market Citizen: Fiscal Policy and Inequality in an Age of Privatization

A new emphasis on privatization is rippling through many fields of state policy in various countries. The restructuring of tax policy to foster a more privatized social and economic order is often overlooked as an example of this pattern. Focusing on Canada, this article argues that recent efforts to revise important facets of the income tax system are best understood through the lens of privatization. That is, Canadian tax policy increasingly discourages people from relying upon government programs or services to meet their basic welfare needs, but encourages them to rely instead upon private resources obtained through the market, or, if necessary, from family or charity. I argue that by promoting personal responsibility in this manner, the tax code is contributing to an erosion of the ideal of social citizenship and replacing it with a new model of market citizenship. While the reforms may offer immediate fiscal benefits to some, the overall effect will heighten social inequalities, with specific effects on gender inequality.

The Globalization of Tax Expenditure Reporting: Transplanting Transparency in India and the Global South

This paper traces the rise of tax expenditure reporting in countries of the Global South, with a particular focus on India. It investigates why and how policy makers in some low and middle income countries are now moving to adopt a budgeting practice that originated in wealthy Western nations in the 1970s. I discuss the potential advantages of this trend, but also argue that there is a need for its champions to face up to some challenges and potential disadvantages of transplanting this form of fiscal transparency into different national contexts. These include methodological and political challenges that are well known to Western observers but are seldom fully acknowledged in the literature advocating adoption of tax expenditure reporting by developing countries. In addition, the chapter questions whether generic prescriptions are sufficiently attuned to local political, economic and institutional circumstances that may diminish the value of OECD-style tax expenditure reporting to receiving countries.