International Development Should…..

Increasingly in recent times we have come first to identify the remedy that is most agreeable, most convenient, most in accord with major pecuniary or political interest, the one that reflects our available faculty for action; then we move from the remedy so available or desired back to a cause to which that remedy is relevant. John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006)

On Again, Off Again (Personal Reminiscences)¹

It was 1982. I was in Sierra Leone as a World Bank short-term consultant. This was the Bank’s first joint agriculture sector review mission with the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD). This assignment also represented several firsts for me as well. It was my first direct encounter with a UN System agency, my first participation in a World Bank mission, my first visit to West Africa, and my first involvement in long-term sector policy assessment and formulation.

I soon discovered that our IFAD colleagues were worried that Bank staff would ignore their desire to consult directly with smallholder farmers at the village level. But that turned out not to be the case and, as an outsider to both IFAD and the Bank, I found little difference in either style or focus between the staff of those two agencies.

Although I was not aware of it at the time, this collaboration with IFAD was evidence of a shift in World Bank attitudes toward United Nations (UN) agencies.  It also signified a growing interest in more participatory approaches, even if by only a small number of Bank staff. And unbeknownst to me, that had been the reason I had been employed by the Bank for this mission.

About eighteen months later (1984), I was hired as the World Bank’s first Institutional Development Specialist and assigned to a new Institutional Development, Technical Assistance, and Training projects division within what was then the Eastern and Southern Africa regional vice-presidency. There again I found an interesting sign of collaboration between the World Bank and the UN. That collaboration took the form of a United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) staff-unit embedded within our projects division. Indeed, the “training” designation in our Division’s title referred to that unit. I confess that I never really understood then nor do I know now what my UNDP colleagues actually did. All I knew was that, although their offices were integrated with ours, they attended our staff meetings, and were evaluated by our projects division chief, they actually had their own portfolio of activities, retained their status as UNDP staff, and were paid by UNDP. And about three years later the unit was dissolved, staff were reassigned either to UNDP headquarters in New York or to that agency’s field offices.

I did not have occasion to interact with any UN agency again until sometime during 1989 when I approached UNDP with a request for financing. Requests to UNDP or other UN entities for grant financing by World Bank staff were rare, but not completely unknown. In this case, I had proposed and received permission to launch a relatively low-cost effort to “develop local consulting capacity in Africa.” But that approval had come with a catch. Although I would have about twenty percent of my time released at the Bank’s expense, I would need to find grant financing for the actual activities elsewhere. So I prepared a draft scope of work and drafted a cover letter for my regional Vice-President to sign and send to several possible sources of grant financing. The only positive responses were from UNDP and the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs, together pledging about $650 thousand. I naively thought that once the two memoranda of  understanding had been signed, the money would be released and I could proceed. But of course, that was not the case. The formal agreements still needed to be negotiated separately and appropriate paperwork prepared and  signed before any money would actually be transferred to the World Bank trust fund account established for this specific activity. And as busy as I was with my normal tasks within the Bank, it appeared that my colleagues in The Hague and New York were even busier. A brief visit to the Ministry in The Hague did the trick there. But it soon became clear to me that a truly understaffed office in New York was attaching a relatively low-priority to the processing of the necessary paperwork and, therefore, the UNDP money might never be actually available. As they explained, it was not that they didn’t want to do it, but they didn’t have the staff-time to do it.

So I invited myself to New York, asked them for an office, and examples of paperwork previously completed for other trust fund arrangements and, with their permission, typed the letters required on UNDP letterhead and personally collected the four or five required signatures so that the letters could be sent to my Managers at the Bank; all of which was completed in one full day. Only a few days later, that signed paperwork arrived in Washington, DC, the trust fund was established, and the money was transferred. I tell this story not to embarrass anyone in UNDP those many years ago, but rather to illustrate the fact that degrees of collaboration between agencies like the World Bank and UNDP are not simply a function of policy, but of the relative priorities and incentives among managers and staff of collaborating organizations.

My next encounter with a UN agency was indirect, even if a bit disconcerting. Although I am a political scientist, my advocacy and modeling of participatory approaches led to my assignment in 1995 as Manager of the “UNDP-World Bank Water and Sanitation Program” (WSP) unit for the “East Asia and Pacific Region” (WSPEAP) headquartered in Jakarta. Established in 1979 as a partnership between UNDP and the World Bank, the WSP was an early example of international consortia managed by the World Bank with regular World Bank staff but financed by grants from multiple donors; the most well-known of which is probably the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) established eight years before. However, although largely financed by UNDP during its earlier years as a program to develop and test very low-cost hand pump and latrine designs suitable for local manufacture, it had shifted by the early 1990s to the design and implementation of small-scale pilot projects meant to demonstrate the efficiency of demand-driven approaches to the design and implementation of projects for provision of safe water and effective sanitation to poor people.

By the time I came aboard in 1995, UNDP headquarters was no longer providing core financing, although individual UNDP country-programs did continue to finance some WSP pilot projects. Financing for our Program in East Asia was provided primarily by the Australian, Swedish, and Swiss bi-lateral aid agencies and from within the World Bank itself as our approach was increasingly incorporated into the design of the Bank’s larger loan or credit financed projects. My satisfaction as a regular World Bank staff with the increasing integration into mainstream World Bank operations was off-set by our apparent inability to establish effective collaboration with other UN system organizations, especially UNICEF’s separate water and sanitation program in the Lao Peoples’ Democratic Republic.

Although UNDP had been heavily involved in the original establishment of the WSP, UNICEF’s own discrete water and sanitation projects were designed and implemented by its own separate staff that were also resident in many of the same countries as UNDP. And despite similar demand-driven approaches to expanding water and sanitation facilities and services to the rural and urban poor, both groups viewed each other as competitors rather than collaborators. Our own Country Program Officer in Vientiane was bedeviled by what he viewed as UNICEF’s successive rejections of overtures to establish closer operational collaboration. However, although maintaining friendly diplomatic relationships with the UNICEF resident office in Vientiane was valuable, it soon became apparent to me that actual collaborative planning and/or implementation was unlikely because our respective institutional incentives pulled us in separate directions. Both groups were scrambling for money from the same bi-lateral donors and staff were not likely to be promoted on the grounds that they deferred to another organization in the interests of greater overall efficiencies. Eventually, our nominally shared UN system identities disappeared as UNDP financing of the joint program ended and the official name of the Program was ultimately changed to “The Water and Sanitation Program” (WSP) in April 2000 to better reflect the multi-donor nature of its financing. Nonetheless, although UNDP no longer finances the Program, its representative continues to serve on its Program Council.²

Introduction³

The conventional expectation at the end of World War II was that the new International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) would focus primarily on providing financial support to member-states while the United Nations (UN) concentrated on global collective security. Nonetheless, it was also expected that IBRD would operate within a broader policy context coordinated by the UN, as implied in Article V of its Articles of Agreement:

The Bank…shall cooperate with any general international organization and with public international organizations having specialized responsibilities in related fields…. In making decisions on applications for loans or guarantees relating to matters directly within the competence of any international organization…participated in primarily by members of the Bank, the Bank shall give consideration to the views and recommendations of such organization.

True, that single Article is not as specific as the multiple provisions specifying the role of the Economic and Social Council (EcoSoc) within the UN Charter. But there is also other evidence that IBRD was expected to operate within the broader mandate of the UN.
One example is provided by the active lobbying by several Latin American delegations in San Francisco for expanding EcoSoc’s power and responsibilities as a direct channel for post-war financial aid to non-European states,⁴ a position directly opposed by the Soviet Union’s view that the UN should limit itself to ensuring “collective security” and not much else.⁵ However, the Latin Americans prevailed as EcoSoc was explicitly tasked with consideration, coordination, and recommendation of proposed economic and social activities (Articles 61-72). But that victory was ultimately incomplete — and therein lays a tale.

The telling of that tale will be presented in a series of five separate blog posts. This first post provides a summary comparison of the UN System and World Bank Group. Part #2 (“Building Walls”) presents the story of their relations during the period from 1946 through the 1950s. Part #3 (“Mending Fences”) extends the story to the evolution of the relationship during the 1960s and 1970s. Finally, Part #4 (“Tensions Re-Emerge”) summarizes relations during the 1980s and 1990s while Part #5 (“Older and Wiser?”) focuses on the period since the year 2000.

Similarities & Differences

The overall structure of the United Nations System and World Bank Group has been described in previous posts. Both of those groups have expanded exponentially since their creation. Given that both the UN and World Bank were born from the same parents almost simultaneously, the extent of differences among organizations both within and between those two broad institutional systems is surprising:

1. Although membership in all entities within the UN System and World Bank Group is limited to sovereign- states, all members of the United Nations General Assembly are not necessarily members of IBRD (or other World Bank subsidiary bodies or specific UN specialized agencies);
2. Although sovereign-state members are represented by their respective governments within UN System and World Bank Group entities, different agencies within those governments represent them in those different international bodies (for example, [i] ministries of foreign affairs generally represent their governments in the General Assembly and Security Council, [II] bi-lateral development agencies, ministries of external affairs, or sector-specific line ministries normally represent them in specialized agencies, and [iii] ministries of finance or central banks normally represent them in the World Bank and International Monetary Fund [IMF]);
3. Although informal agreements existed that the Administrator of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the President of the World Bank should both be Americans,⁶ a wide range of other nationalities have always served in the highest leadership position of other UN specialized agencies;
4. Although senior leaders within both systems stressed the importance of “country-knowledge” among staff, the UN system began posting Resident Representatives to client countries very early-on while the World Bank continues to rely primarily on staff and consultants dispatched from its Washington headquarters; and
5. Although the UN system fairly rapidly expanded its interests in international development assistance and capacity to provide it, the attention of its overall leadership and Secretariat staff remains focused on, in the words of Craig Murphy, “matters of international high politics.”⁷

In addition to the differences summarized above, three others are even more fundamental: (1) their respective decision-making structures; (2) their sources of finance; and (3) the terms under which development assistance is provided.

Decision-Structures

It is generally well understood that the United Nations General Assembly operates on the principle of “one country, one vote” without regard to the different amount of dues paid by each individual member-state. That is also true of all other UN “principal organs” except for the Security Council where China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States each have an absolute veto. Less well understood is that decision-making structures vary among UN specialized agencies, including the World Bank Group and IMF.

It is impossible to describe that entire range of variation among UN System agencies within this blog post. But in broad terms, there are three broad decision-making arenas within the UN and World Bank Group systems. The first two are the “principle organs” of the United Nations where decisions made by individual member-states are directly represented and the various “secretariats” where the professional leadership and staff of UN subsidiary bodies and specialized agencies make operational decisions themselves.⁸ The third arena is found primarily within the walls of the World Bank’s headquarters in Washington, DC where, although officially part of the United Nations system, decisions are independently made by its middle and senior managers.⁹ With that three-fold classification in mind, the remainder of this blog post focuses primarily on the relationship between UNDP and its predecessor agencies on the one hand with IBRD and the International Development Association (IDA) on the other hand.

Financing Development Assistance

Most welfare and development-oriented UN entities provide assistance as grants. Although grants do not require repayment, some cost-sharing is almost always required of recipient governments. Nonetheless, because most UN activities are financed by grants it is most often limited to provision of technical assistance or training.

Although a few, relatively small, grants are sometimes provided by the World Bank, the overwhelming majority of its finance is provided by IBRD in the form of “loans” at or near market interest rates and zero-interest concessional “credits” provided by IDA. Differences between IDA and IBRD are limited to: (1) sources of finance; (2) eligibility for finance; and (3) fees charged borrowers and terms of repayment. The principal amount of IDA credits must eventually be paid back, but only a small fee of half of one percent is charged, there is normally a ten-year grace period before repayment begins, and full repayment is extended for twenty to thirty years beyond that. Since 1970 (the date from which adequate time-series data is available), World Bank financing has been substantially larger than that provided by the UN’s largest agencies.

According to the World Bank’s current classification scheme, member-countries are eligible to borrow from IDA only if their per capita income was less than $1,165 during 2009¹⁰ and they are not sufficiently credit-worthy to borrow from IBRD. That means that only countries classified as “lower-income” plus a few at the very lowest end of the “lower middle income” range might be eligible. Member-states with per capita incomes above $1,165 but less than $12,196 are eligible for IBRD loans. “High income” member-states with incomes of above $12,195 are not eligible for any borrowing from the World Bank. A few lower middle-income “blend” countries like India and China have been allowed to maintain a mixed-status allowing access to borrowing some combination of IBRD loans and IDA credits that effectively lower the aggregate amount of interest they are charged.

Sources of Finance

Financing formulas and arrangements vary substantially among different United Nations organizations and commissions.  A very brief comparison of the way the UN General Assembly, UNDP, UN Specialized Agencies, IBRD, and IDA are financed is provided below.

UN General Assembly Authorized Core Budget & Peacekeeping. UN member-states are assessed dues for three-year periods. Dues range from a maximum “ceiling” of twenty-two percent of the total core budget to a minimum “floor” of only 1/1,000^th of one percent based primarily on estimates of each member’s gross national income (GNI). Since the founding of the UN, the United States has been the only country whose dues are levied at the maximum rate; from at least fifty percent of the UN’s regular core budget in 1945 to one-third in 1955 and twenty-two percent of the UN’s 2010 core budget.¹¹

UNDP. As a subsidiary body of the United Nations General Assembly, the UN’s regular core budget subsidizes a small percentage of its total expenditures. The remainder is raised directly through direct negotiations with UN member-states. At the time that UNDP’s predecessor Extended Programme of Technical Assistance (EPTA) was established in 1949, its leadership understood that its financial survival required two things: (1) continued voluntary support by the United States, including by both Congress and the President, and (2) increasing contributions by Scandinavian countries, especially Sweden, that had escaped relatively unscathed from World War II. Therefore, it is not surprising that the United States voluntarily contributed a full sixty percent of its budget in 1949 and declined only slowly to fifty percent by 1958 at the dawn of the de-colonization era. Nonetheless, by 2004, the United States contribution had declined to only about twelve percent of what had become the UNDP budget.

UN Specialized Agencies. By contrast with subsidiary organs like UNDP, specialized agencies are not normally subsidized even in part by the UN’s regular core budget. Instead, they negotiate the amount of dues with each of their own member-states directly. In addition, several agencies like UNICEF also raise funds from both public and private sources. Some agencies also contract their services directly to individual member-states; as UNESCO, UNICEF, and WHO did to the United States Government in Iraq during 2003 and 2004.¹²

IBRD. By contrast to all UN principal organs (other than the Security Council), subsidiary bodies, and almost all other specialized agencies, World Bank Group entities and the IMF employ a weighted voting system whereby the share of total votes held by each individual member-state is determined by their relative share of subscribed capital. Nonetheless, the actual voting power of individual member-states varies within each of the Bank Group’s five entities.

With specific respect to IBRD, the minimum number of shares assigned to each member is tied to the financial “quota” that state is required to deposit with the IMF.¹³ Because the voting power of original and early members of the Bank (Articles of Agreement, Article V) has declined as the number of member-states has increased, the United States’ share of total IBRD votes has been dramatically reduced from the thirty-seven percent of the total in 1944 to today’s sixteen percent (click below for Figure 1).

Figure 1 – WB Voting Shares (1947-2005)

The primary difference between the manner in which the United Nations, IMF, IDA, and IBRD are financed is that, unlike all those others, IBRD member-states are not required to pay-in the full amount of their capital subscriptions. Instead, the overwhelming bulk of IBRD’s resources come from borrowing in the private sector financial markets (Article IV), the collateral for which are the financial guarantees by its sovereign-state members that their unpaid capital subscriptions will be available if required to meet the Bank’s obligations (Article II). Although available, calls on unpaid capital subscriptions have never been necessary. Indeed, the Bank has always posted an annual profit. In 2007, that profit exceeded $1.65 billion.¹⁴ That, in turn, has enabled IBRD to provide substantial funding in its own right to IDA and various other multi-donor trust funds managed by the Bank. Because the bulk of IBRD financing is raised through the private sector bond market, the need to establish and maintain a superior credit rating among international private investors has been critical to the IBRD’s financial success. Indeed, IBRD’s “first bonds, issued  in July 1947, were substantially oversubscribed.” According to the private non-profit Bank Information Center (BIC), the IBRD had by 2008:

paid-in capital of US$11.5 billion and callable capital of US$178 billion…. [and] with capital backing of nearly US$200  billion from its member governments.., [had a] “AAA” credit rat[ing] and [is able to on-]lend those funds to  borrowers at rates slightly below those offered by commercial lenders.¹⁵

IDA. IDA was established in 1960 for reasons that will be discussed in Part #2 of this five-part series. Although it operates under the terms of  its own Articles of Agreement, it is actually a fund rather than a separate organization. Indeed, the managers and staff of IBRD and IDA are exactly the same. The procedures for identifying, appraising, supervising, and evaluating IDA credits are also the same. As a separate fund, IDA is financed primarily by contributions from its members pledged approximately every three years during “replenishment rounds;”¹⁶ the seventeenth of which begins during 2011. Those funds are also supplemented by repayment of previous IDA credits and direct contributions from IBRD profits. Although not very large to date, those repayments will increase as IDA’s very long-term repayment periods are increasingly reached over future years. As in the case of IBRD, voting within IDA is weighted according to the number of shares subscribed, but the amount of shares subscribed is entirely voluntary.¹⁷ Because all members of IBRD are not also members of IDA¹⁸ and the number of shares is voluntarily subscribed, the share of votes held by each member-state varies from those exercised within IBRD. Thus, while the United States currently holds only sixteen percent of votes within IBRD, it holds eleven percent of votes within IDA.¹⁹

Summary Conclusion

As will be illustrated in subsequent parts of this five-fold series, different sources of finance, membership, and voting formulas account for many of the different priorities and behaviors among UN and World Bank organizations rather than different moral principles. Differences in financial sources limited UN system entities largely to technical assistance and education assistance while enabling the World Bank to provide substantial capital for large-scale infrastructure development. As will be demonstrated in the following four parts of this series, those different capacities led their respective organizations in different directions. As only one example, while UNICEF was established in 1946 and WHO two years later, the World Bank did not begin to finance projects in the education and health sectors until 1962 and 1979 respectively (click below for data provided in Figure 3).

Figure 3 — UN/WB Comparisons: Macro-Organizational & Thematic (1947-2011)

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NOTES:

^[1]All “Personal Reminiscence” posts are stories told about one or more of my own personal experiences as I remember it. They are true to the best of my ability to recollect them and reflect my view of how they illustrate “lessons learned” from that experience even if one or another aspect of the story as told might not be completely correct in each and every detail. Further, I have done my best to disguise the identity of other persons referred to in these stories, including not using their true names unless references to their presence at that time or circumstance has already been published by others in other media.

^[2] WSP’s current donors include Australia; Austria; Canada; Denmark; Finland; France; Ireland; Luxembourg; Netherlands; Norway; Sweden; Switzerland; United Kingdom; United States; The World Bank; and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

^[3] Louis Emmerij, Richard Jolly and Thomas G. Weiss point out that “there is no comprehensive history of the United Nations (UN), either institutional or intellectual…. [even though] several specialized agencies have written or are in the process of writing their institutional histories.” That contrasts with the publication of two large histories of the World Bank, both of which were sponsored by the Bank to commemorate its 25^th and 50^th anniversaries (Edward Mason and Robert Asher, The World Bank Since Bretton Woods [Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, 1973] and Devesh Kapur, John Lewis, and Richard Webb, The World Bank: Its First Half Century, two volumes [Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1997]), and the employment of an in-house historian who ensures the capture of its place in history with regular publications (for example, James Boughton, Silent Revolution: The International Monetary Fund 1979–1989 (Washington, DC: International Monetary Fund, 2001). See Louis Emmerij, Richard Jolly and Thomas G. Weiss, Economic and Social Thinking at the UN in Historical Perspective, Development and Change 36 (2005), p. 211–235.

^[4] Latin American delegations argued forcefully that EcoSoc’s authority to “recommend” development projects and policies should be understood to have the force of a directive or veto with respect to the decisions of any UN subsidiary or specialized agency. They formulated that position following the Inter-American Conference on the Problems of War and Peace at the Chapultepec “Castle” in Mexico City from February 21 to March 8, 1945 in response to the United States delegation’s statement that its priority for post-war financing – and by extension the IBRD’s priority as well — would be the reconstruction of Allied European economies rather than development of Latin American economies that had largely stagnated during the War. See the Declarations on Reciprocal Assistance and American Solidarity, known as the “Act of Chapultepec,” see United States Army Information School, “Pillars of Peace” in Documents Pertaining to American Interest in Establishing A Lasting World Peace: January 1941 – February 1946 (Carlisle Barracks, Pa.: Army Information School Book Department, May 1946). Also see Jean Krasno, A Step Along an Evolutionary Path: The Founding of the United Nations, Global Dialogue 2 (Spring 2000); Colombia’s Resolution on Aggression Introduced at Inter-American Conference; New York Times (February 23, 1945); Harry S. Truman Library and Museum, Reminiscence of William Sanders, written responses to questions as part of Oral History Project (August, 1975); and Jerry Mark Silverman, An International Economic History of Latin America & The Caribbean in Jose de Arimateia da Cruz and Eduardo Gomez (ed.), Latin America in the New International System: Challenges and Opportunity (Boston: Pearson Custom Publishers, 2005), p. 57-96.

^[5]See Harry S. Truman Library & Museum, Oral History Interview with August Maffry, interview conducted by Richard D. McKinzie as part of Oral History Project (January 19, 1973).

^[6] The informal agreement with respect to the World Bank Group is still apparently in effect, although increasing noises are made to end it. The informal agreement with respect to UNDP ended with the appointment of Mark Malloch Brown, a citizen of the United Kingdom and at the time the World Bank’s Vice-President for both External Affairs and United Nations Affairs, as UNDP’s 6^th Administrator on April 23, 1999. He was the first UNDP Administrator who was not a United States citizen to serve in his own right since the establishment of UNDP in 1966. He was succeeded by Kemal Dervis, a citizen of Turkey and also former World Bank Vice-President, in  August 2005 and by Helen Clark, former Prime Minister of New Zealand on April 17, 2009.

^[7] Louis Emmerij, Richard Jolly, and Thomas Weiss assert that “…UN secretaries-general basically confirm that political and security crises tend to fill all the available time, and that economic and social issues assume a lower priority.” They quote Javier Perez de Cuellar, UN Secretary-General from January 1, 1982 to December 31, 1991, to bolster that statement: “Coming from the Third World, I was especially unhappy during my ten years as Secretary-General with the failure of the United Nations to work as a system more effectively for economic and social development . . . It can be persuasively argued that, over the years, there has been inadequate leadership on the part of the Secretary-General and the UN Secretariat in placing the United Nations in the forefront of economic thinking . . . Moreover, the political and administrative demands on the Secretary-General have always come first. See Louis Emmerij, Richard Jolly, and Thomas Weiss, Economic and Social Thinking at the UN in Historical Perspective, Development and Change 36 (2005), p. 211–235. Javier Perez de Cuellar’s quote is from his Pilgrimage for Peace (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1990) while Craig Murphy’s quote is from The United Nations Development Programme: A Better Way? (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006). A history “commissioned by UNDP” that is nonetheless “an independent publication” in which the “views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations Development Programme.”

^[8] The identification and formulation of two of these four “arenas” is borrowed from Louis Emmerij, Richard Jolly and Thomas G. Weiss who differentiate within the UN system between the “arena where states make decisions” and “the leadership and staff of international secretariats.” See Louis Emmerij, Richard Jolly and Thomas G. Weiss, Economic and Social Thinking at the UN in Historical Perspective, Development
and Change 36 (2005), p. 211–235 and Thomas Weiss, David Forsythe, and Roger Coate, The United Nations and Changing World Politics 4^th edition (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2004).

^[9] For reasons discussed in a forthcoming blog post (“From United States to World Bank Dominance”), the World Bank’s executive directors do not significantly affect World Bank Group decisions.

^[10] The IDA-eligible per capita income ceiling is recalculated by the World Bank on July 1^st of each year using its Atlas method.

^[11] For illustrative purposes, the top ten member-state assessments for the UN regular core budget for 2005-2007 (the most recent year for which I could find data) were: United States (22.0%); Japan (19.5%); Germany (8.7%); United Kingdom (6.1%); France (6.0%); Italy (4.9%); Canada (2.8%); Spain (2.5%); China (2.1%); and Mexico (1.9%); United Nations, Questions and Answers about the United Nations (June 30, 2006). See also the United Nations Association of the United States of America, U.S. Dues and Contributions.

^[12] I have personal knowledge of UNESCO’s, UNICEF’s, and WHO’s participation in that part of the Coalition Provisional Authority’s program administered by USAID in Iraq for only the years 2003 and 2004. I do not know how long they individually or collectively continued that involved beyond April 2004.

^[13] According to IBRD’s Articles of Agreement (Article IV), “each member shall have two hundred fifty votes plus one additional vote for each share of stock held.” See also World Bank, Voting Powers, Board of Directors.

^[14]Bank Information Center (BIC), World Bank (IBRD & IDA).

^[15]Ibid.

^[16] Article III of IDA’s Articles of Agreement suggests that replenishments will occur “approximately five years” apart, but in fact several member-states have refused to make commitments beyond three years at a time.

^[17] According to IDA’s Articles of Agreement (Article VI), “each original member shall, in respect of its initial subscription, have five hundred votes plus one additional vote for each $5,000 of its initial subscription.”

^[18] As of June 25, 2010, IDA’s total membership consisted of 170 sovereign-states equivalent to 91% of IBRD’s total membership of 187. The 17 IBRD members that have not joined IDA to date are: Antigua and Barbuda; Bahrain; Belarus; Brunei; Bulgaria; Jamaica; Lithuania; Malta; Namibia; Qatar; Romania; San Marino; Seychelles; Suriname; Turkmenistan; Uruguay; and Venezuela.

^[19] See International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, Management’s Discussion and Analysis, The World Bank Annual Report 2010 (June 30, 2010).

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