08 Nov UN Budget Battles
The New York Times reports on budget season at the UN and various battles hotting up. It’s a good piece by Neil MacFarquhar, dated November 7, 2009. As the article says, that fact that
it costs the United Nations an average of $2,473 per page to create every single document in its six official languages, while outside contractors complete the same work for around $450, prompts diplomats to accuse the organization of running amok during a global financial crisis.
That’s the opening. It is followed by an excellent discussion, sourced with a lot of conversations with participants in this year’s budget negotiations, of the tugs and pulls of the UN budget, the issues of add-ons from the Secretariat, what the appropriate budgetary contribution of the BRICs should be in relation to developed but much smaller economies (China versus Canada, for example), and the moral hazard problem of small non-paying nations willing to impose larger contributions on the minority of paying states. Other things too. It’s one of the best news pieces in the English language press on this issue in the last couple of years; short, well researched and sourced, highly recommended. (I put up a longer and more opinionated version of this at Volokh – I think Julian refers to it above.)
Quote: “That ultimately leaves the operating budget as the place to cut, hence the questions raised about costs like the $2,473 per page. “They are not printed on gold leaf,” one diplomat dryly noted. That price tag, said Ms. Kane, the budget czar, reflects the fact that the body keeps a staff of translators on call 24 hours a day to make sure any document can be translated instantly into English, Russian, French, Arabic, Spanish and Chinese”
I had to laugh at this part. UN Translation is insanely slow – it sometimes takes 10 MONTHS to translate a document into Chinese….