An Assessment of Grant-based Multilateral Funding Flows from 2014 to 2016
Abstract
This paper presents a global snapshot of how all countries, plus the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, allocated approximately $63 billion per year across 54 major multilateral organizations during the 2014–16 period. We assess direct funding to United Nations and non-UN organizations to examine three key questions. First, how much does each funder contribute to each organization? Second, what is the relative importance of each funder to each organization? Third, how do funding allocations compare to objective benchmarks like share of donor country income, share of world income and share of world population? We find that a small number of countries provide a majority of total funding and a small number of organizations account for a majority of total resources received. Only a handful of countries are the top funders to at least one organization, but a variety of mid- and smaller-sized economies play larger relative roles in some smaller organizations. Estimating funders’ flows across organizations allows for assessment of their revealed preferences among multilateral priorities and enables comparison against objective benchmarks for burden-sharing. To our knowledge, this is the first study to provide a comprehensive mapping of all countries’ recent annual grant funding across the majority of large multilateral institutions.
The shifting contours of multilateral cooperation
Amid rapid changes in the global economic and political landscape, many norms of multilateral cooperation are in flux. For example, some high-income countries that have traditionally helped to lead the modern multilateral system have conveyed increasing concerns about the relative costs and benefits of investing in existing institutions. At the other end of the spectrum, some fast-growing emerging economies have been increasing their funding in existing multilateral organizations while also investing in the creation of new ones.
Guided by a widespread sentiment that global institutional arrangements need to evolve in step with shifting challenges, even the most senior representatives of the international system have been emphasizing a need to ‘reform’ (e.g. Guterres, 2016). To that end, debates over how best to align multilateral resources and priorities should only take place in the presence of clear quantitative baselines. But in the realm of funding flows across relevant multilateral institutions, there has not been a regular and systematic assessment of how all countries are allocating financial contributions across all multilateral bodies.
The data gap is particularly important in light of the three seminal 2015 agreements for multilateral cooperation: the Sustainable Development Goals, the Paris Agreement on climate change and the Addis Ababa Action Agenda on financing for development. The lack of an overall mapping of multilateral funding flows makes it difficult to clarify the specific system changes that might need to be made to advance relevant policy goals, or to discern countries’ current revealed preferences across issues and institutions.
Moreover, if a country is considering the strategic value of its investment in a particular organization, that assessment is best done with a view to both its own investments in other organizations and other countries’ investments in similar organizations. A number of United Nations (UN) organizations receive funding through ‘assessed contributions’ that are not optional. But funding for non-UN organizations is generally all voluntary, as is a large share of funding for many UN organizations. So at a very practical level, inadequate system-wide information also presents operational challenges for country funders trying to develop strategies that span the complexities of diverse multilateral organizations, when each has its own budget mechanics and many have their own unique multi-year funding calendars.
In that context, this paper aims to provide an overarching quantitative snapshot, as of the 2014–16 period, of how countries of all sizes and stages of development have recently been allocating direct grant funding across 54 major multilateral entities, both inside and outside the formal UN system. We also consider grants provided by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF), the world's largest and arguably most influential philanthropic contributor to multilateral organizations. We do this through the generation of a novel dataset that can provide a resource for future researchers considering more detailed political economy questions that might pertain to individual countries and institutions.
In this paper we use the dataset to consider three basic overarching questions. First, how much does each funder allocate to each organization? Second, what is the relative importance of each funder to each organization? This allows us to assess which funders are the ‘big fish’ in each organization's funding ‘pond’ and how that ‘fish factor’ compares across organizations. Third, how do funding allocations compare to objective benchmarks like share of donor country income, share of world income and share of world population?
Our sample's emphasis on large and mid-sized grant-financed institutions implies that not every multilateral organization is included in the analysis. For example, it does not include many small organizations or non-concessional multilateral development banks whose lending-based business models are anchored in periodic capital injections, such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development or the Inter-American Development Bank. Nor does our overall mapping of funding flows delve into component questions pertinent to the funding structures of specific institutions or sectors.22
We do not, for example, delve into component debates on assessed versus voluntary contributions for relevant UN organizations, or earmarked funding, which some analysts consider to be less ‘multilateral’ in nature.
Nonetheless, to our knowledge, this is the first study to construct a broadly comprehensive recent snapshot of direct annual grant financing from all countries across the majority of large multilateral institutions. In this regard, we complement Jenks et al.'s (2018) assessment of UN development-focused organizational budgets by also including a wide range of non-UN organizations. However, our UN-related results differ from Jenks and colleagues because we focus on direct country-level funding contributions to each organization, while they present each organization's total nominal inflows, including inter-organizational funding and a range of private donations. We also expand upon the OECD (2015) analysis of its own member countries’ funding to multilateral organizations by including funding from all countries at all stages of development.
Our results add further context to other recent studies that explore policy questions for a sample of countries or a subset of the multilateral organizations. For instance, Graham (2017) looks at how changing funding rules have affected the governance of intergovernmental organizations, while Bayram and Graham (2017) consider how mandatory versus voluntary funding options affect country contributions to UN organizations. Grimm and Chun (2017) assess the growing role of BRICS’ (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) contributions to the UN development system. Meanwhile Clinton and Sridhar (2017) examine funding and governance trends among a sample of global health organizations.
Methods overview
While the Appendix in the online Supporting Information provides a more detailed description of our methodology, the core elements are as follows. First, we established a main sample period of 2014–16. These years were chosen to provide a baseline aligned with the major 2015 international agreements mentioned earlier; to take advantage of the most recent UN funding data available; and to capture the corresponding (if chronologically staggered) multi-year replenishment cycles for non-UN entities like the World Bank's International Development Association and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria.33
In one instance – for the UNICEF 2014 data – we noticed a coding error in the UN-SCEB database and hence adjusted estimated annual averages for that organization accordingly, as described in the Appendix.
We calculate annual averages to avoid potential skewness caused by year-to-year funding variations. Volumes are estimated in nominal US dollar terms, either as directly reported by original sources or as estimated at various points in the sample period.
Second, to identify the relevant sample of organizations, we start by identifying all 34 organizations recently reported in the UN online financial database (UN-SCEB, 2017). Some of the funding flows count as official development assistance (ODA) and some do not. For the non-UN portion of the sample, we only include organizations that received ODA during the period, according to the OECD's online Creditor Reporting System (2018). We then narrowed the sample to include only the entities that received direct contributions of at least $50 million in 2015, and for which we were able to identify donor-by-donor annual funding sources.44
These criteria resulted in the exclusion of 65 non-UN organizations listed in the OECD-CRS that had reported direct funding of less than $50 million in 2015, of which 27 had a reported value of zero.
This results in 20 non-UN organizations, for a full sample of 54 organizations, as listed in Box 1.
Box 1. Multilateral organizations in sample
| 34 UN organizations | |
| DPKO | Department of Peacekeeping Operations |
| FAO | Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations |
| IAEA | International Atomic Energy Agency |
| ICAO | International Civil Aviation Organization |
| IFAD | International Fund for Agricultural Development |
| ILO | International Labour Organization |
| IMO | International Maritime Organization |
| IOM | International Organization for Migration |
| ITC | International Trade Centre |
| ITU | International Telecommunication Union |
| PAHO | Pan American Health Organization |
| UN | United Nations |
| UN Women | UN Women |
| UNAIDS | Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS |
| UNDP | United Nations Development Programme |
| UNEP | United Nations Environment Programme |
| UNESCO | United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization |
| UNFPA | United Nations Population Fund |
| UN-HABITAT | United Nations Human Settlements Programme |
| UNHCR | United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees |
| UNICEF | United Nations Children's Fund |
| UNIDO | United Nations Industrial Development Organization |
| UNITAR | United Nations Institute for Training and Research |
| UNODC | United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime |
| UNOPS | United Nations Office for Project Services |
| UNRWA | United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East |
| UNU | United Nations University |
| UNWTO | World Tourism Organization |
| UPU | Universal Postal Union |
| WFP | World Food Programme |
| WHO | World Health Organization |
| WIPO | World Intellectual Property Organization |
| WMO | World Meteorological Organization |
| WTO | World Trade Organization |
| 20 other organizations | |
| AfDF | African Development Fund |
| AsDF | Asian Development Fund |
| CFF | Concessional Financing Facility (MENA financing) |
| CGIAR | Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research |
| CoEurope | Council of Europe |
| CTF | Clean Technology Fund |
| Francophonie | Organisation internationale de la Francophonie |
| GAFSP | Global Agriculture and Food Security Program |
| Gavi | Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance |
| GCF | Green Climate Fund |
| GEF | Global Environment Facility Trust Fund |
| GEF-Climate | Special Climate Change Fund; Least Developed Countries Fund; and Adaptation Fund |
| GFATM | The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria |
| GPE | Global Partnership for Education |
| IDA | International Development Association |
| MFIMP | Multilateral Fund for the Implementation of the Montreal Protocol |
| OAS | Organization of American States |
| OSCE | Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe |
| SCF | Strategic Climate Fund |
| WB-TF | World Bank Trust Funds - Recipient-Executed Grant |
Third, we identify relevant raw data sources on funding. For UN organizations, financial data are extracted directly from the UN's own consolidated financial database (UN-SCEB 2017), which had information available for recent years up to 2016 at the time of writing. Since we are interested in overall patterns of country resource allocation across UN and non-UN organizations, rather than the composition of funding within each UN organization, we sum assessed plus voluntary contributions for each UN entity as needed. In cases where countries are in arrears on their assessed contributions, such as with United States funding to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), we err on the side of counting arrears as actual funding, that is, long-term obligations that will eventually need to be paid.
The process of synthesizing funding data for non-UN organizations requires more intensive efforts to harmonize information from 17 different sources (see Appendix for list of sources). These data are not otherwise reported in any single consolidated source for all countries. We draw frequently from organizations’ annual funding reports, which allows us to examine a full sample of countries beyond those listed in the OECD Creditor Reporting System (e.g. Brazil and China). For organizations with multi-year replenishment cycles that draw from different currencies, we use average annual exchange rates to convert pledges into annual US dollar equivalents where required.
Fourth, we adjust the data to align with our emphasis on original country-sourced funding contributions. In particular, we exclude funding rechanneled from one multilateral organization to another. The exception here is the European Commission/European Union, which we treat as a direct funder. Meanwhile, we also pool some funding accounts to facilitate distillation of key flows. For example, we count funding to the Advanced Market Commitment and the International Finance Facility for Immunisation as part of the funding for Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance (previously known as the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization). We also pool three climate-related trust funds administered by the Global Environment Facility (GEF) and report them as a consolidated “GEF-climate” account, separate from the regular replenishment process of the main GEF Trust Fund. For World Bank-administered trust funds, we use an online database (World Bank, 2015) to identify and sum 526 recipient-executed grants into a single ‘World Bank Trust Funds’ tabulation.
We include BMGF in the sample due to its unique status as the world's largest and arguably most influential philanthropy contributing to the multilateral organizations assessed. Indeed our results show that the foundation ranks among the top decile of sovereign country funders in the sample. We do not include any other non-profit, private or contract funding to organizations. To estimate BMGF funding volumes, we use a combination of multilateral organizations’ reports, the foundation's own online database, and information provided directly by foundation staff via e-mail.55
We thank Sarah Orzell and Dan Peters of BMGF for their helpful assistance in sharing organizational data, while noting that no BMGF staff were involved in the analysis presented in this paper.
To our knowledge, our dataset presents the first synthesized estimate of BMGF grant-making to multilateral organizations. However, we do not capture all of the foundation's grants to all multilateral organizations. For example, BMGF makes grants to multilateral development banks, which are beyond the scope of this assessment.
As a result of our methodology, the country and organizational-level funding shares reported in our dataset will sometimes differ from those that would be simply extracted from an organization's annual reported revenue. For example, the United Nations Children's Fund's (UNICEF) 2015 annual report describes $5.0 billion of revenues, but our assessment only includes the $3.2 billion in grants from the direct funders in our sample (UNICEF, 2016). The other $1.8 billion come from other multilateral organizations and private sector donors (holding aside BMGF). Therefore, our estimates of funding shares reflect the percentage of ‘direct’ public dollars allocated to each multilateral organization, rather than a percentage of each organization's total budget.
Results
Our results are presented in four parts. Part 1 charts the total scale of resource flows by funder and recipient organization; Part 2 maps the distribution of funders’ allocations across organizations; Part 3 maps the relative importance of each funder to each organization and Part 4 compares funders’ allocation patterns to objective benchmarks for assessing burden sharing. All data for the tables and figures are also available in digital form as an online supplement.
Part 1. Total funding by country and organization
Figure 1A shows the volume of annual resources provided by each funder in total absolute dollar amounts, with funding to 34 UN organizations (a total of $38.4 billion) indicated in blue and funding to 20 other multilaterals (a total of $24.8 billion) indicated in orange. The top four funders account for approximately 50 per cent of the funding and the top 32 funders account for 95 per cent of the funding. The other 188 funders are reflected in the final vertical bar at the far right.
The US is by far the largest overall funder in absolute terms, at $14.1 billion per year, with 70 per cent allocated to UN system organizations. The United Kingdom is the second-largest funder, at $7.5 billion, with 39 per cent allocated to UN entities. Japan is the third-largest funder at $5.4 billion, split nearly evenly between UN and non-UN entities. The rest of the top 10 funders are Germany ($4.4 billion), France ($2.6 billion), Canada ($2.6 billion), the EC-EU ($2.5 billion), Sweden ($2.3 billion), Norway ($2.1 billion) and the Netherlands ($1.8 billion). BMGF is the 17th largest multilateral funder, at more than $880 million per year.
Source: Author's calculations using AfDB 2013; AsDB 2016; Central Intelligence Agency 2017; CGIAR Consortium Office 2015, 2016, 2017; Council of Europe 2013, 2016; Gavi 2017; GEF 2014; GFATM 2014, 2015, 2016; GPE 2017; OECD 2018; OSCE 2015, 2016, 2017; OAS 2015, 2016; UN-DESA 2017; UN Secretary-General 2014, 2016; UN-SCEB 2017; and World Bank 2013a,b,c, 2015, 2016a,b,c, 2017a. See Appendix 2 for details.
Figure 1B translates the same funding volumes into per capita contributions, excluding BMGF. Norway is the clear leader in the chart, contributing $398 per capita per year. Sweden is second at $231, followed by Denmark ($161), Switzerland ($153), the UK ($114), Finland ($113), Netherlands ($106) and Kuwait ($76). A few of the smaller funders not included in the chart also contribute significant amounts in per capita terms, including Luxembourg ($230), Monaco ($189) and Liechtenstein ($128).66
Note that rankings here exclude the Holy See, which has a population of approximately 450 people and contributed approximately $345,000 per year, equivalent to more than $765 per person.
The US ranks 20th in per capita terms at $44, and Japan ranks 21st at $42.
Source: Author's calculations using AfDB 2013; AsDB 2016; CGIAR Consortium Office 2015, 2016, 2017; Council of Europe 2013, 2016; Gavi 2017; GEF 2014; GFATM 2014, 2015, 2016; GPE 2017; OECD 2018; OSCE 2015, 2016, 2017; OAS 2015, 2016; UN Secretary-General 2014, 2016; UN-SCEB 2017; and World Bank 2013a,b,c, 2015, 2016a,b,c, 2017a. See Appendix 2 for details.
Figure 2 shows the recipient side of these annual funding flows. UN organizations are again shaded blue while non-UN organizations are shaded orange. The World Bank's IDA was the largest funding recipient during the sample period, with $8.6 billion of average annual contributions, followed closely by the UN's Department of Peacekeeping Operations, at $8.4 billion. These two entities account for more than a quarter of the sample's total funding flows.
There is a considerable drop to the third-largest recipient, the World Food Program, at $4.9 billion. The core United Nations budget follows at $4.4 billion, which funds activities ranging from the General Assembly to the UN Secretariat and the regional economic commissions. Next is the consolidated grouping of World Bank Trust Funds, which add up to $3.5 billion per year, and then the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria (GFATM), each at $3.3 billion. Even after excluding the World Bank Trust Funds, the six largest organizations account for more than half the sample's total annual funding. At the smaller end of the budget range, fully 29 of the multilateral entities in our sample receive direct funding of less than $500 million per year and 11 receive less than $100 million per year.
Part 2. Countries’ funding priorities
Figure 3 provides a mapping of flows from funders to organizations. On the left side of the chart, funders are listed in descending order, starting with the largest at the top. Each horizontal row represents the distribution of that country's total funding across organizations, with darker blue indicating larger shares of their funding, and each row adding up to 100 per cent. The vertical columns represent the sample's 34 largest funding recipients, starting with the largest on the left and matching the order in Figure 2. These 34 organizations account for over 97 per cent of total flows in the sample. Overall, the 32 funders and 34 organizations in Figure 3 represent 93 per cent of total flows in the sample.
The prevalence of darker blues on the left side of Figure 3 shows, not surprisingly, that most of the major funders tend to allocate larger shares of resources to larger organizations. However, there is variation in terms of which organization gets the largest amount of each funder's resources. Eight countries in the figure allocate the largest share to UN peacekeeping operations (US, France, Italy, China, Korea, Spain, Russia and the United Arab Emirates), while 12 allocate the largest share to the World Bank's IDA (UK, Japan, Germany, Canada, Sweden, Netherlands, Australia, Switzerland, Denmark, Belgium, Finland, and Austria). Other funders give top allocation to a variety of other entities, such as Norway to World Bank Trust Funds; Brazil to the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO); the BMGF to Gavi; Argentina to UNDP and Kuwait to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).
The figure also highlights the varying extent to which different funders have concentrated their allocations among specific organizations. For example, nine funders – China, Brazil, BMGF, Spain, Russia, Austria, Argentina, Peru and Colombia – each target more than half their resources in the sample to only two organizations. At the other end of the spectrum, some donors spread their resources more evenly. Norway's top two allocations account for less than a quarter of its funding, for example, as do Denmark's.
Part 3. Organizations’ top funders
Figure 4 presents the same funders and organizations as Figure 3, but here each cell indicates the share of each organization's direct funding provided by the relevant country. Vertical columns now add up to 100 per cent, and darker green shades indicate larger shares of organizational funding. The darker the shading, the bigger the ‘fish factor’ in each organization's direct funding pond.
Most organizations have a clear top funder. For some bodies like UN Peacekeeping Operations, this is largely driven by an explicit formula for burden-sharing through assessed contributions. For other bodies, including non-UN bodies that are funded on a solely voluntary basis and UN bodies with significant voluntary funding, it might suggest implicit agreements about which country will take a special leadership role for each organization. Among the 34 entities listed in the figure, the US is the largest funder for 19, the UK is the largest for seven and Japan is the largest for four. Meanwhile Sweden is the largest funder for the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) and UN Women, France is largest for the Council of Europe (CoEurope) and Brazil is largest for PAHO. Box 2 shows the lead funder for each of the 54 organizations in the full sample. Notably, BMGF is the second largest funder for three organizations: Gavi, the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research (CGIAR).
Source: Author's calculations using AfDB 2013; AsDB 2016; CGIAR Consortium Office 2015, 2016, 2017; Council of Europe 2013, 2016; Gavi 2017; GEF 2014; GFATM 2014, 2015, 2016; GPE 2017; OECD 2018; OSCE 2015, 2016, 2017; OAS 2015, 2016; UN Secretary-General 2014, 2016; UN-SCEB 2017; and World Bank 2013a,b,c, 2015, 2016a,b,c, 2017a. See Appendix 2 for details.
Source: Author's calculations using AfDB 2013; AsDB 2016; CGIAR Consortium Office 2015, 2016, 2017; Council of Europe 2013, 2016; Gavi 2017; GEF 2014; GFATM 2014, 2015, 2016; GPE 2017; OECD 2018; OSCE 2015, 2016, 2017; OAS 2015, 2016; UN Secretary-General 2014, 2016; UN-SCEB 2017; and World Bank 2013a,b,c, 2015, 2016a,b,c, 2017a. See Appendix 2 for details.
Box 2. Top funder for each of 54 multilateral organizations
| US | 25: | DPKO, WFP, UN, UNICEF, GFATM, UNHCR, WHO, IOM, UNRWA, FAO, IAEA, ILO, UNESCO, GCF, CGIAR, CTF, UNEP, UNODC, UNAIDS, WTO, OSCE, OAS, MFIMP, GAFSP, WMO |
| UK | 9: | IDA, WB-TF, AfDF, Gavi, GPE, IFAD, SCF, ITC, UPU |
| Japan | 9: | UNDP, AsDF, GEF, CFF, UNIDO, ITU, UNU, WIPO, UNWTO |
| France | 2: | Council of Europe; La Francophonie |
| Sweden | 2: | UNFPA, UN Women |
| Germany | 1: | GEF-Climate |
| EU / EC | 1: | UN-HABITAT |
| Switzerland | 1: | UNITAR |
| Brazil | 1: | PAHO |
| BMGF | 1: | UNOPS*a
Notes: *Only a very small share of UNOPS funding comes through grants; organizations ordered by volume of total contributions received; see Box 1 for list of acronyms.
|
| Argentina | 1: | ICAO |
| Panama | 1: | IMO |
- a Notes: *Only a very small share of UNOPS funding comes through grants; organizations ordered by volume of total contributions received; see Box 1 for list of acronyms.
In Figure 4, looking from left to right, the number of darker green cells gradually expands for organizations with smaller budgets. This suggests that smaller funders have an opportunity to be bigger fish (playing larger relative roles) in organizations with less overall funding. For example, among the smaller organizations not listed in this figure, Panama is the lead funder for the International Maritime Organization (IMO), Argentina for the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), and Switzerland for the UN Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR). The Appendix includes a corresponding figure for the 20 smaller organizations.
Part 4. Benchmarking funding
A limitation of the preceding figures is that they track the scale of grant flows between each funder and recipient without providing context relative to the size of each country's population and economy. For example, a country's share of funding flows can be compared to its share of world population, share of world income and – for OECD donor countries – share of total OECD donor country income.
Figure 5 presents one form of this assessment for the 29 individual country members of the OECD Development Assistance Committee (DAC).77
i.e., excluding the EU/EC, a 30th member of the OECD-DAC.
The graph presents the ratio of each country's total contributions to multilateral organizations in the sample relative to its share of OECD-DAC total income. A ratio greater than one indicates funding is larger than the country's share of OECD-DAC income and a value less than one indicates funding is smaller than the share of relevant income. (The Appendix includes similar graphs for the 32 largest funding countries relative to world income and world population.)
Source: Author's calculations using AfDB 2013; AsDB 2016; CGIAR Consortium Office 2015, 2016, 2017; Council of Europe 2013, 2016; Gavi 2017; GEF 2014; GFATM 2014, 2015, 2016; GPE 2017; OECD 2018; OSCE 2015, 2016, 2017; OAS 2015, 2016; UN Secretary-General 2014, 2016; UN-SCEB 2017; and World Bank 2013a,b,c, 2015, 2016a,b,c, 2017a,b. See Appendix 2 for details.
Norway has the highest ratio in Figure 5, contributing 3.1 times its share of OECD-DAC income. Sweden follows with a ratio of 2.9, then Luxembourg at 2.3, Denmark at 2.0, the UK at 1.9 and Finland at 1.8. Among the three largest absolute funders in the sample, only the UK exceeds its share of OECD-DAC income. The US has a ratio of 0.57: its 22.3 per cent share of the sample's funding compares to its 39.0 per cent share of OECD-DAC income. Meanwhile, Japan has a ratio of 0.77, based on its 8.6 per cent share of sample funding and 11.1 per cent share of OECD-DAC income.
Figure 6 presents a visual framework for assessing how each country's funding to each organization compares to similar benchmarks. The top three funders in the sample—the US, UK and Japan – are presented as illustrative cases. Corresponding figures for a selection of other countries are available in the Appendix. Within each panel, the horizontal bars represent the share of direct funding the country provides to each respective organization, that is, its fish factor within that organization. The ordering from top to bottom therefore offers a sense of where each country is a bigger or smaller fish in the organizational pond. This also provides potential insight into each funder's revealed preferences for prioritizing across organizations. From left to right, the first (blue) vertical line represents the country's share of world population; the second (red) line represents the share of world income and the third (green dotted) line represents the share of OECD donor income.
Figure 6 draws attention to each country's different sequence of organizations from top to bottom, and the differing number of horizontal bars surpassing each respective vertical line. The first panel shows that the US contributes at least its share relative to total donor country income for the Global Agriculture and Food Security Program (GAFSP), the Organization of American States (OAS), the Clean Technology Fund (CTF), UNHCR and the World Food Program (WFP). Meanwhile, its contributions to WHO and UNICEF are roughly equivalent to the country's share of global economic activity. Near the bottom of the panel, US contributions to UN Women and the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) are similar to its share of world population.
Source: Author's calculations using AfDB 2013; AsDB 2016; Central Intelligence Agency 2017; CGIAR Consortium Office 2015, 2016, 2017; Council of Europe 2013, 2016; Gavi 2017; GEF 2014; GFATM 2014, 2015, 2016; GPE 2017; OECD 2018; OSCE 2015, 2016, 2017; OAS 2015, 2016; UN-DESA 2017; UN Secretary-General 2014, 2016; UN-SCEB 2017; and World Bank 2013a,b,c, 2015, 2016a,b,c, 2017a,b. See Appendix 2 for details.
The middle panel shows that the UK allocates at least its share of OECD donor country income to 33 organizations, with its biggest fish factors in the Strategic Climate Fund (SCF), the CTF and Gavi. At the bottom of the panel, the UK appears to have decided not to prioritize the Green Climate Fund (GCF), PAHO, UNITAR and the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) – the latter two organizations also appearing near the bottom of the US panel.
The right-side panel indicates that Japan provides at least its share of donor country income to 11 organizations, with its biggest fish factors in the United Nations University (UNU), AsDF and WIPO. In the lower part of the chart, Japan's fish factors are smaller than its share of world population at CGIAR, UNAIDS, Gavi, the International Trade Centre (ITC), the Global Partnership for Education (GPE) and the OAS.
Analysis of fish factors beyond the three countries presented in Figure 6 can shed light on other interesting patterns. For example, Sweden exceeds its share of total OECD DAC income for 41 organizations, followed by Norway at 40, and Finland and Switzerland at 33. Across OECD DAC member countries, all 29 allocate more than their share of total donor income to four or more organizations in the sample, but most members (21 countries) allocate less than their share of donor income to at least half (27) of the organizations in the sample. When looking more broadly at all funders’ allocations, 187 countries provide more than their share of world income to at least one of the 54 organizations in the sample.
Conclusions
This paper analyzes information from official data sources to estimate a sum of approximately $63 billion in direct, country-level average annual grant funding allocated across 54 major multilateral organizations during the 2014–16 period. It finds that funding sources are concentrated, with nearly half the sample's total resources provided by four funders – the US, the UK, Japan and Germany – and 95 per cent provided by 32 funders. However, among these four largest funders, only the UK contributes more than its share of OECD donor country income to the multilateral organizations in the sample. In per capita terms, the four largest funders are Norway, Sweden, Luxembourg and Monaco. Each provides more than $185 per person per year to multilateral organizations. Denmark and Switzerland also provide more than $150 per person per year.
A majority of the sample's total resources are allocated to a small number of organizations, with six entities receiving more than half of the overall funding. Four of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council give their largest share of funding within the sample to UN peacekeeping operations: China, France, Russia and the US. The UK gives its largest share to IDA, the World Bank's concessional financing arm.
The US, UK and Japan played special funding roles across the multilateral system during the sample period. One of these three countries was the largest funder for each of 43 organizations in the sample, including all of the 17 largest organizations. Overall, the US is the top funder for 25 organizations, the UK for nine organizations and Japan for nine organizations. Only a handful of other funders are the lead contributor to other organizations, including France (for two organizations), Sweden (2), Germany (1), the EU/EC (1), Switzerland (1), Brazil (1), BMGF (1), Argentina (1) and Panama (1). This suggests that even mid and smaller sized economies can choose to play special lead funding roles within specific organizations. Notably, the BMGF provides more than $880 million per year to multilateral organizations and is the second-largest funder to CGIAR, Gavi and WHO.
Estimating each funder's relative importance to each organization – how big a relative fish it is in each pond – enables the opportunity to compare each country's ‘fish factor’ across organizations. This in turn offers the opportunity to consider countries’ revealed preferences among multilateral priorities. Moreover, fish factors can be compared to objective standards for global burden-sharing, like share of world population, world income or donor country income. Such standards could potentially even be used to assess each country's contributions toward each of the Sustainable Development Goals.
Altogether, the quantitative assessment in this paper offers a potential starting point for evaluating each country's recent multilateral priorities and the relative importance of those priorities to each multilateral organization. Different countries might consider a variety of strategic rationales. A large economy, for example, might decide simply to be the largest and thereby most influential funder for each institution it prioritizes, regardless of standards for burden-sharing. Alternatively, it might decide to use objective standards of burden sharing as a tool to encourage other countries, especially those with large economies, to make greater investments too. Meanwhile a country with a mid-sized economy – for example the 10th or 15th largest in the world – faces a strategic choice between being a comparably ranked funder for each organization or a top ranked funder in a smaller number of organizations, potentially starting with those that have smaller overall budgets. Countries with smaller economies will face even more constrained versions of such choices and trade-offs.
For the leaders of multilateral organizations, the information presented in this paper permits a clear-eyed assessment of how countries are prioritizing across issues and institutions. In some instances, the data might illuminate an inadvertent mismatch between stated priorities and current patterns of resource allocation. In other instances, the numbers might help dispel misunderstandings resulting from politely ambiguous rhetoric. Under any circumstance, there is a clear need for objective, neutral benchmarks to assess funding allocations across countries and organizations.
One practical near-term issue embedded in the paper's results is that several organizations use multi-year funding replenishment cycles that overlap and are staggered over time. Many of the relevant organizational budgets are large, so there could be potential benefits – for both funders and organizations alike – to increasing coordination across organizations’ replenishment cycles. A broader set of implications is to consider how the estimated matrix of funding flows might inform assessments of changes required in the overall multilateral architecture, both among existing institutions and in the context of major emergent entities like the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and the New Development Bank.
Finally, future research could usefully unpack underlying streams of finance to each entity and investigate how funding flows have changed over time, potentially reflecting shifts in priorities. In the meantime, the analysis presented here can help inform each country and multilateral organization's own debates about where forthcoming investments are needed most.
Acknowledgements
The authors thank Margaret Biggs, Kaysie Brown, Homi Kharas and Tony Pipa for very helpful comments at various stages of research and drafting; Alex Palacios for valuable assistance in sharing Global Partnership for Education replenishment data and Joshua Miller and Merrell Tuck-Primdahl for excellent support in editing the text.
Role of the Funding Source
The authors are both employees of the Brookings Institution. Brookings recognizes that the value it provides is in its absolute commitment to quality, independence and impact. Activities supported by its donors reflect this commitment and the analysis and recommendations are not determined or influenced by any donation. A full list of contributors to the Brookings Institution can be found in the Annual Report at https://www.brookings.edu/about-us/annual-report.
Notes
Biographies
John W. McArthur is a senior fellow in the Brookings Institution's Global Economy and Development Program. He is also a senior advisor to the UN Foundation and a board governor of the International Development Research Institute. He previously served as manager and deputy director of the UN Millennium Project.
Krista Rasmussen is a senior research analyst in the Brookings Institution's Global Economy and Development Program.
