ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated gender-based inequalities of all kinds. Threadbare healthcare budgets and national public health systems, the products of decades of both global neoliberalism and domestic politics, have left women particularly vulnerable. Challenging the Washington Consensus view, this chapter draws on the insights of the broad Law and Political Economy tradition to propose a constitutional theory of money. It is argued that money is a legal institution which, while financing the needs of markets, has a fundamental political and legal design. Money is an institution of governance that distributes power relations in society, an issue which is well-illustrated by the consideration of national budgets. This chapter builds on the existing literature on national budgets and gender by considering the challenges and potentialities of a feminist public finance to reconstruct society's legal-economic nexus so as to address gender inequality.
