Peacekeeping and Burden-Sharing, 1994-2000

This article updates earlier analyses of peacekeeping burden-sharing for the 1994-2000 period. In particular, we apply a Kendall tau test to determine whether peacekeeping burdens are being shouldered by the large countries for the small countries in recent years. This test indicates the rank correlation between GDP and peacekeeping burdens. Two sets of countries are examined: NATO allies and a broader sample of the primary supporters of peacekeeping missions. The study investigates burden-sharing not only for UN-led peacekeeping missions, but also for UN-led and non-UN-led missions (for example, Implementation Force in Bosnia, the Kosovo Force). Our spending proxy for non-UN-led peacekeeping missions relies on troop expense and is much more systematic than proxies in prior studies. The statistical findings indicate that burden-sharing is much more disproportionate during recent years when compared with the Cold War era. This result suggests that peacekeeping has a relatively large share of purely public benefits, which is leading to some ‘exploitation of the large by the small’. It is anticipated that this disproportionality will increase over time and lead to more suboptimal allocation of resources to peacekeeping from a global vantage point. This article also extends the analysis to investigate the rank correlation between GDP per capita and peacekeeping burdens in order to ascertain whether the rich are exploited by the poor. There is some evidence of disproportionate burdens being carried by the rich for just the NATO sample during two recent years when both UN-led and non-UN-led missions are included.