A Multilateral Donation that Boomerangs Home: Analysing the Donor State Advantage in UN Procurement

Abstract

Bilateral aid procurement is politicised and strongly favours suppliers from donor countries. Does multilateral development assistance eliminate the procurement bias favouring donor countries because international bureaucrats make procurement decisions? Existing evidence from the World Bank, which delegates procurement responsibilities to aid recipient countries, cannot answer our theoretical question. Using official data from 20 UN organisations during the 2013–2018 period and applying regression and mediation analysis, we find that the procurement of international organisations still favours donor countries when international bureaucrats make procurement decisions. We identify donor state representation within the UN staff as a key stepping stone linking donation to procurement bias. In contrast, member states whose nationals are heads of a UN bureaucracy do not enjoy procurement advantage, suggesting that UN procurement bias operates through an informal bottom-up channel. Our paper contributes to the debates on the independence of international organisations in the context of multilateral development assistance and procurement.

Keywords:

• UN bureaucracy
• donation
• UN procurement

Acknowledgements

The authors thank the editor and anonymous reviewers for many helpful comments. The authors also thank seminar participants at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, the University of Macau, 2021 Annual Meeting of EPSA, and 2022 Annual Meeting of MPSA for their feedback and comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

Data and code are available upon request.

Notes

1 Voluntary contribution includes two types of contributions: specific contributions and non-specific contributions. In this research, we sum these types to determine the voluntary contribution and do not distinguish the types in our data because they are highly correlated.

2 We did not use the dataset from Novosad and Werker (2019), which is only updated to 2013.

3 Trade openness is ‘the sum of exports and imports of goods and services measured as a share of gross domestic product’.

4 Local IO activity is defined as the size of the locally hired general services staff (for example, drivers and secretaries).

Additional information

Funding

This project benefitted from the University of Macau grant (MYRG 2018-00154-FSS).