An Assessment of Grant‐based Multilateral Funding Flows from 2014 to 2016
| Author | Krista Rasmussen,John W McArthur |
| Published date | 01 May 2019 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.12653 |
| Date | 01 May 2019 |
An Assessment of Grant-based Multilateral
Funding Flows from 2014 to 2016
John W McArthur and Krista Rasmussen
Brookings Institution
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 orga-
nization? Second, what is the relative importance of each funder to each organization? Third, how do funding allocations com-
pare 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 econo-
mies have been increasing their funding in existing multilat-
eral organizations while also investing in the creation of
new ones.
Guided by a widespread sentiment that global institu-
tional arrangements need to evolve in step with shifting
challenges, even the most senior representatives of the
international system have been emphasizing a need to ‘re-
form’(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 con-
tributions 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 cli-
mate 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’cur-
rent revealed preferences across issues and institutions.
Moreover, if a country is considering the strategic value
of its investment in a particular organization, that assess-
ment 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 contribu-
tions’that are not optional. But funding for non-UN organi-
zations 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 for-
mal 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 multi-
lateral 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
©2019 The Authors. Global Policy published by Durham University and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Global Policy (2019) 10:2 doi: 10.1111/1758-5899.12653
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use,
distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Global Policy Volume 10 . Issue 2 . May 2019
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