An indiscreet view on the budget of multilateralism | Part 1: Who is on top?

Published on 29 January 2025

The impact of certain countries and certain leaders on multilateralism, as we know it, depends on more than one factor, and not all of them should be circumstantial. Whatever extraordinary powers and influence we attribute to super-leaders of enormous imprint in history, such as Napoleon, Hitler, or Stalin, those powers and influence are also determined by some characteristics of their times and societies.

Therefore, if we have to assess or predict the impact¹ of a certain more or less spectacular election on multilateralism, we should look at other circumstances and current trends as well.

Within the narrow ambit of this text, we use the term multilateralism as defining the United Nations quintessence of global multilateralism, without ignoring the existence of other forms of multilateralism, limited to less than a universal magnitude, that is 193 Member States.

Unlike other erudite approaches based on wise judgement, reasoning, hypotheses, and logic, this text will only show figures. Figures can indeed be impersonal and mute, but sometimes they could irrupt into eloquence.

The only possible merit of the enumeration of figures below is that they could inspire and help the imagination of the readers and of the learned analysts who try to decipher the implication of recent elections in the United States. When figures represent money, they gain in significance. I count on the only logical connection I can afford, which is between those who pay the bills and those who make decisions.

Where is the power in the United Nations? In the hands of Member States, through two principal organs: the Security Council and the General Assembly for different mandates and means. The United Nations does not have the competence to produce financial resources. Its bills are paid from the contributions collected from the governments of the Member States. The United Nations work is funded through regular budgets, voluntary contributions, and funds attracted from private companies and individuals.

The Security Council

The figures below represent exclusively the assessed contributions of the Member States to the regular budgets of the United Nations, as apportioned by the General Assembly of the United Nations², based on the proposals of the Committee of Contributions, a body of experts elected on their personal capacity.

The assessed contributions of the Member States are calculated every three years, using a methodology that starts from the percentage of each member state in the world GNI as a first step, and continues with nine other steps, which include relief measures and limits to the scale of contributions determined by political decisions. The scale of assessment for 2004-2006 was decided in 2003, the one for 2007-2009 in 2006, etc. In Table 1, the figures below the years represent the percentage of the mandatory contributions of each country to the regular budget.

	2004-2006%	2007-2009%	2010-2012%	2013-2015%	2016-2018%	2019-2021%	2022-2024%	2025-2027%
United States	22.000	22.000	22.000	22.000	22.000	22.000	22.000	22.000
China	2.053	2.667	3.189	5.148	7.921	12.005	15.254	20.004

Table 1: The assessed contributions of the United States and China

The image shows a line graph depicting the evolution of the assessed contributions of the current two largest contributors, the US and China. Between 2003 and 2024 the US has consistently contributed 22%, whilst the contribution of China has frown, from 2% to 20%.

The choice of the two countries is obviously arbitrary, but they were chosen because they represent a moment of historic importance, and an inflexion point in the evolution of the United Nations, where two nations exceed the threshold of 20 percent, after seventy years when only one country paid a two-digit contribution. The evolution of the assessed contribution of the United States is constant, as it was frozen by the General Assembly at the level of 22 percent in 2000, the previous one being 25 percent. The assessed contribution of China is the result of the calculation according to the methodology.

Due to the spectacular increase in the contribution of China, for the first time the total contributions of the five permanent members of the Security Council exceed half of the regular budget of the United Nations.

United States	China	United Kingdom	France	Russian Federation
22.000 %	20.004 %	3.991 %	3.858 %	2.094 %

Table 2: The contributions of the five permanent members of the Security Council to the regular budget of the United Nations according to the scale of assessments decided for 2025-2027.

Before Brexit, one of the controversial points discussed in the context of the reform of the Security Council was the apparent contradiction between the idea that the European Union has a single defence and security policy and the presence of two EU members (France and the United Kingdom) among the permanent members. The same argument was made when the candidature of Germany for a new permanent seat in the Security Council was proposed. After Brexit, the issue lost significance as France is now the only EU member with a permanent seat. However, assuming that discussion on the membership of the Security Council will ascend again on the agenda of the General Assembly, it may be useful to anticipate the addition of new figures.

If the European Union had one single voice in the Security Council, the joint assessed contributions of all its member states would be 28.49 percent.

A plausible hypothesis for a while was the addition of just two permanent members to the Security Council: Germany and Japan.

Germany	5.692 %
Japan	6.930 %
Total	12.620 %

Table 3: The Contributions of Germany and Japan to the regular budget of the United Nations according to the scale of assessment decided for 2025-2027.

That will increase the significance of the Security Council in terms of funding powers. Note should be taken that the share of the permanent members of the Security Council to the budgets of peacekeeping operations – which are funded separately – will be considerably higher.

In the context of the debate of a needed multipolarism as an alternative to unipolarism or to a new bipolarism, the group entitled BRICS comes often into discussion.

China	20.004 %
Russian Federation	2.094 %
Brazil	1.411 %
India	1.106 %
South Africa	0.251 %
Total	24.87 %

Table 4: The contributions of the first 5 original members of BRICS to the regular budget of the United Nations

[Part II of this blog post will be published soon]

Dr Petru Dumitriu was a member of the Joint Inspection Unit (JIU) of the UN system and former ambassador of the Council of Europe to the United Nations Office at Geneva. He is the author of the JIU reports on ‘Knowledge Management in the United Nations System’, ‘The United Nations – Private Sector Partnership Arrangements in the Context of the 2030 Agenda’, ‘Strengthening Policy Research Uptake’, “Cloud Computing in the United Nations System”, and “Policies and Platforms in Support of Learning”. He received the Knowledge Management Award in 2017 and the Sustainable Development Award in 2019 for his reports. He is also the author of the Multilateral Diplomacy online course at DiploFoundation.