UN peacekeeping as a public good: analyses of the UN member states' peacekeeping financial contribution behavior

Hirofumi Shimizu

ISU General Staff Papers from Iowa State University, Department of Economics

Abstract: This dissertation analyzes UN peacekeeping as a public good. The first chapter discusses the basics of UN peacekeeping: the UN organs involved in peacekeeping, the main characteristics of various types of peace operations, the 50-year history of UN peacekeeping, the financing methods used by the United Nations for its peacekeeping operations. As an attempt to survey the change in suboptimality of UN peacekeeping efforts, the second chapter of this dissertation examines the financial burden-sharing patterns of selected UN member states for the period of 1975-96. Using non-parametric statistical tests, this chapter studies the rank correlation between GDP and share of GDP devoted to UN peacekeeping for four different subsets of UN member states. The test results show evidence of increased disproportionate burden sharing by wealthy countries in the first half of 1990s for a sample which includes only NATO member states. In the third chapter, a reduced-form UN peacekeeping contribution function is derived using a joint-product model, in which peacekeeping efforts are assumed to produce contributor-specific benefits as well as purely public benefits.;The contribution functions are estimated for a sample of 25 UN member states for the period of 1975-96. The two-stage least square method is used to get rid of the simultaneity problem associated with public good allocation problem. The estimation results indicate that countries' peacekeeping contributions react positively to spillins, and react very little to income fluctuations. The fourth chapter analyzes the effects of special assessment system on UN member states' peace-keeping contributions. Countries' actual contribution patterns under the assessment system are examined, and a theoretical model which explains the patterns is developed. The author argues that even without effective sanctions against undercontribution, the existence of assessments increase a country's contribution by increasing its contributor-specific benefits. This chapter also explores a theoretical possibility of increasing the total contribution of each country by redistributing its assessments across peacekeeping operations according to the value placed on each operation by the country.

Date: 1999-01-01
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