Magical thinking and the scales of assessments

In recent weeks, I’ve read and reviewed several articles and think pieces proposing changes to the scales of assessments (which set the share of UN budgets that each member state is responsible for paying). The scales are negotiated by the General Assembly every three years, and the next negotiation will take place in the Fifth Committee at the end of next year. If you need a refresher on how the scales are calculated, I included a primer in an earlier piece published in November.

The trap that many academics, researchers, and advocates keep falling into when generating policy proposals for changing the scales is the idea that there is an objectively fair or conceptually sound approach to apportioning the expenses of the organization among its member states is possible. The methodology for calculating the scales of assessments certainly appears technical. After all, it relies on economic statistics on exchange rates, gross national income, population, and external debt. This all gives the impression that a scientific approach can yield an optimal (or at least improved) arrangement.

But all of this hides a very simple fact: the scales—like all other administrative and budgetary issues at the United Nations—are not technical questions, but political ones. The realm of the possible is bounded by both procedural and substantive constraints that cannot be ignored. Any proposal that fails to grapple with these issues will not be taken seriously by policymakers.

Because of the zero-sum nature of scales negotiations and the fact that the Fifth Committee uses consensus as a de-facto decision-making standard, changing the scales methodology is an extremely heavy lift for member states. The methodology therefore only changes when there is some external political development that makes the normal operation of the scales no longer compatible with what member states are willing to pay. Note that this is almost never about what member states are able to pay, as the amounts assessed are tiny compared to government expenditures.1 Because of inequality aversion, member states are loath to pay more when they believe others are not paying their fair share.

In other words, the scales are fundamentally a political bargain that reflects how much each member state is willing to contribute. Member states don’t really care about the methodology; they care about how much they have to pay as a result of the methodology. All of the economic data used in the scales methodology (exchange rates, gross national income, external debt, population, etc.) and the fact the Statistics Division of the Department of Economic and Social Affairs supports the work of the Committee on Contributions are there to provide pseudo-technical window dressing for a purely political decision. When the General Assembly changes the scale methodology, it is to reverse-engineer a desired outcome and make it appear legitimate through the use of economic data.

It’s not difficult to see evidence of this pseudoscientific approach in the scales. Although each step in the methodology has a justification, the convoluted calculation is peppered with entirely arbitrary elements. In the regular budget scale, these include the length of the base periods, the application of the debt burden adjustment only to a subset of countries, the value for the gradient in the low per capita income adjustment, and the levels for the floor and ceilings. In the peacekeeping scale, these include both the levels into which member states are sorted and the amount of discount provided to each—especially those provided only to high-income members of the Group of 77 and China.

The negotiations in 2000 that led to the reduction in the regular budget ceiling and a new peacekeeping scale of assessments are illustrative of the entirely political nature of the scales. The United States had two fundamental objectives in the negotiations: to bring the U.S. assessment rate for the regular budget down to 22 percent (from 25) and for peacekeeping budgets down to 25 percent (from above 30).

To get around the usual zero-sum dynamics around scales negotiations, the United States expanded the scope of the negotiations to include repayment of its accumulating arrears, which were close to triggering the Article 19 threshold that would result in the loss of voting privileges in the General Assembly. And to get around the normal working methods of the Fifth Committee, the United States engaged in a concerted year-long effort of leveraging its global diplomatic reach to make the scales an issue of its bilateral relations with other member states. And the fact that the permanent representative—Ambassador Holbrooke—personally led the pre-negotiation diplomatic engagement and the multilateral negotiations made it abundantly clear how much of a priority this issue was for the U.S. government.2

The United States ultimately prevailed; on 23 December 2000, the General Assembly adopted resolutions on the scales reducing the maximum rate for the regular budget to 22 percent and promulgating a new approach to calculating peacekeeping apportionments that would progressively reduce the U.S. rate over time, though not quite to the desired 25 percent.3 Throughout the negotiations, delegates tweaked elements of the methodology until it yielded an acceptable outcome.4 In the eyes of member states, conceptual clarity and methodological rigor took a backseat to the assessment rates ultimately generated by the calculation. And, in exchange, the United States paid nearly a billion dollars in arrears, despite the 25 percent target for peacekeeping not having been met.5

I am not aware of any full-court diplomatic press on the part of the United States or any government to change the scales this time around. And while the Trump administration clearly continues to believe that the United States should pay less, it may not care as much about the scales this time around. After all, the formal assessment rate doesn’t truly matter that much to an administration that doesn’t honour its financial obligations and which has taken an à la carte approach to paying its assessed contributions. As such, I doubt that there will be major changes to the scales methodology as a result of the upcoming scale negotiations.

But that is not to say that the scales for 2028-2030 will not represent a major change for the organization. Given economic trends, China—currently the member state responsible for the second largest share of the regular budget and peacekeeping budgets—is likely to catch up to the U.S. under the existing scale methodology. In other words, China would not just be the de facto largest financial contributor (given ongoing U.S. withholding), but also tied as the de jure largest financial contributor. It would be the first time in the history of the United Nations that the United States was not the largest contributor, and would be yet another signal that the era of multilateralism dominated by the United States is drawing to a close.

The point of this piece, like so many pieces I’ve written in the past year, is to underline the importance of understanding the interaction between the interests of decision-makers and the decision-making process itself. Proposals that fail to take politics into account and include a credible strategy for overcoming procedural obstacles are at best a distraction. They also risk setting unrealistic expectations for what is achievable and set the groundwork for further disappointment and disillusionment in the functioning of the multilateral system when those expectations are inevitably unmet.

[Note: This post was edited on 16 April 2026 to correctly reflect the next scale period, which will be 2028-2030 and not 2027-2029 as was originally published. End note.]

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© 2026 Eugene Chen under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

The views expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations University.