Monitoring Policy Making at the United Nations |
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Member States' Assessed Share of the UN Budget
The Fifth Committee of the UN General Assembly decides on the scale of assessments for contributions to the Regular Budget every third year. The scale of assessments reflects a country’s capacity to pay (measured by factors such as a country’s national income and size of population). The Peacekeeping Budget assessments are based on the Regular Budget rates, but with discounts for poor countries. The five permanent members of the Security Council, who approve all peacekeeping operations, pay extra fees to compensate for those discounts. A “ceiling” rate sets the maximum amount of any member state’s assessed share of the regular and Peacekeeping Budgets. The US is the only member that is affected by those ceilings. Consequently the US pays less than its share of the world economy. (There is also a minimum rate of 0.001% to the Regular Budget for poor countries.) In December 2000, the Fifth Committee voted to lower the ceiling rate from 25% to 22% for the Regular Budget. The US had promised to pay its longstanding debt to the UN in exchange for lower assessments. Half a decade later, the US still owes around US$500 million to the UN Regular Budget.
More Tables and Charts on:
UN Finance
Tables and Charts
UN Regular Budget Scale of Assessments for 2001 (December 26, 2000):
The 2000 scale lowered the US payments from 25 to 22% of the regular budget.
(ST/ADM/SER.B/568) pdf version
Status of Contributions as at 31 January 2007 (January 31, 2007) ST/ADM/SER.B/709 UN Regular Budget Scale of Assessments for 2006 (December 27, 2005) ST/ADM/SER.B/668 UN Regular Budget Scale of Assessments for 2005 (December 23, 2004) ST/ADM/SER.B/638 UN Regular Budget Scale of Assessments for 2004 (December 24, 2003) ST/ADM/SER.B/612 UN Regular Budget Scale of Assessments for 2003 (December 20, 2002) ST/ADM/SER.B/597 UN Regular Budget Scale of Assessments for 2002 (December 24, 2001) ST/ADM/SER.B/582
Lowering the ceiling for assessments to the UN Regular Budget could help limit the political influence of the richest countries within the UN. This table shows that small increases in the assessments of other UN member states, not affected by the ceiling, could provide the additional funding needed. (Global Policy Forum)Articles
The UN Assessment Scale
An analysis of the scale for apportionment of UN expenses among member states approved by the General Assembly in December, 1997. Written by Jeffrey Laurenti, Executive Director, Policy Studies, UNA-USA, this piece is of enduring relevance for its lucid explanation of the calculation of the assessment formula and related questions . See also the UNA-USA paper describing the legislative process in the US Congress that decides How US Contributions to the UN are Determined.Burden Sharing in Support of the United Nations
A study by Lawrence R. Klein, University Of Pennsylvania and Kanta Marwah, Carleton University. An early version of the paper was presented in a seminar at Yale University in 1997. This paper examines objective criteria and related amounts of apportionment of financial burden for support of the United Nations among the members, approached from an economic point of view.
