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March 25, 2006

The tired joke among the anti-war left is Q: Why were the neocons so sure Iraq had WMD? A: Because they kept the receipts. (Insert approving smirks in place of laughter.)

A similar jibe could be made about the conventional wisdom that holds the UN is corrupt. Ilyana Kuziemko and Eric Werker recently presented a paper that supplies and answer to the question, Why are the neocons so convinced the UN is crooked? The abstract:

Ten of the fifteen seats on the U.N. Security Council are held by rotating members serving two-year terms. Using country-level panel data, we find that a country's foreign aid receipts rise substantially when it is elected to the Security Council: on average, U.S. aid increases by 54 percent and U.N. development aid rises by 7 percent. We find that the positive effect of Security Council membership on aid is much greater during the years in which key diplomatic events take place, when members' votes are likely to be especially valuable. Further, the increase in aid is shown to begin the year a country is elected to the council and to disappear after its membership ends. We find evidence that the effect of council membership on U.S. aid is especially large for dictatorships and U.S. allies, suggesting that the United States seeks to form alliances with the council members who are cheapest to bribe. Finally, the connection between U.N. aid and council membership seems to be driven by UNICEF, and aid organization over which the Unites States has historically exerted much control.

Posted by Zach Wendling at March 25, 2006 07:39 PM

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