Sharing the Burden of Collective Security in the European Union. Research Note

This article compares European Union (EU) burden-sharing in security governance distinguishing between assurance, prevention, protection, and compellence policies. We employ joint-product models and examine the variation in the level of publicness, the asymmetry of the distribution of costs and benefits, and aggregation technologies in each policy domain. Joint-product models predict equal burden sharing for protection and assurance because of their respective weakest-link and summation aggregation technologies with symmetric costs. Prevention is also characterized by the technology of summation, but asymmetry of costs implies uneven burden-sharing. Uneven burden-sharing is predicted for compellence because it has the largest asymmetry of costs and a best-shot aggregation technology. Evaluating burden-sharing relative to a country?s ability to contribute, Kendall tau-tests examine the rank-correlation between security burden and the capacity of EU member states. These tests show that the smaller EU members disproportionately shoulder the costs of assurance and protection; wealthier EU members carry a somewhat disproportionate burden in the provision of prevention, and larger EU members in the provision of compellence. When analyzing contributions relative to expected benefits, asymmetric marginal costs can largely explain uneven burden-sharing. The main conclusion is that the aggregated burden of collective security governance in the EU is shared quite evenly

BURDEN SHARING AT THE IMF

In the context of the financial governance of the International Monetary Fund, what are the equity implications of the way in which the IMF distributes the cost of running its regular (non-concessionary) lending operations as well as how it funds its concessionary lending and debt relief operations? While the IMF charges borrowers roughly what it pays its creditor members for the resources used in its regular lending operations, its overhead costs (administrative budget plus addition to reserves) are shared between the two groups of members in a less equitable manner. With overhead costs rising inexorably to meet the increasing number and range of responsibilities being placed on the institution – largely at the instance of the IMF‘s principal creditors by virtue of their dominant majority of voting power – the under-representation of the IMF’s debtors undermines the legitimacy of its decision making. With regard to the concessionary lending and debt relief operations, some of the IMF’s funding modalities have involved a substantial contribution by IMF debtors, sometimes under pressure. While this has been accepted as part of an intra-developing-country burden-sharing exercise, it has also significantly reduced the cost to developed countries of meeting their responsibilities to the poorest members of the international community.

On sharing NATO defence burdens in the 1990s and beyond

This article investigates NATO burden sharing in the 1990s in light of strategic, technological, political and membership changes. Both an ability-to-pay and a benefits-received analysis of burden sharing are conducted. During 1990-99, there is no evidence of disproportionate burden sharing, where the large allies shoulder the burdens of the small. Nevertheless, the theoretical model predicts that this disproportionality will plague NATO in the near future. Thus far, there is still a significant concordance between benefits received and defence burdens carried. When alternative expansion scenarios are studied, the extent of disproportionality of burden sharing increases as NATO grows in size. A broader security burden-sharing measure is devised and tested; based on this broader measure, there is still no disproportionality evident in the recent past.

The UN in the lab

We consider two alternatives to inaction for governments combating terrorism, which we term Defense and Prevention. Defense consists of investing in resources that reduce the impact of an attack, and generates a negative externality to other governments, making their countries a more attractive objective for terrorists. In contrast, Prevention, which consists of investing in resources that reduce the ability of the terrorist organization to mount an attack, creates a positive externality by reducing the overall threat of terrorism for all. This interaction is captured using a simple 3×3 “Nested Prisoner’s Dilemma” game, with a single Nash equilibrium where both countries choose Defense. Due to the structure of this interaction, countries can benefit from coordination of policy choices, and international institutions (such as the UN) can be utilized to facilitate coordination by implementing agreements to share the burden of Prevention. We introduce an institution that implements a burden-sharing policy for Prevention, and investigate experimentally whether subjects coordinate on a cooperative strategy more frequently under different levels of cost sharing. In all treatments, burden sharing leaves the Prisoner’s Dilemma structure and Nash equilibrium of the game unchanged. We compare three levels of burden sharing to a baseline in a between-subjects design, and find that burden sharing generates a non-linear effect on the choice of the efficient Prevention strategy and overall performance. Only an institution supporting a high level of mandatory burden sharing generates a significant improvement in the use of the Prevention strategy

Sharing the Burden of GHG Reductions

Abstract and PDF report are also available on the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change website (http://globalchange.mit.edu/).The G8 countries propose a goal of a 50% reduction in global emissions by 2050, in an effort that needs to take account of other agreements specifying that developing countries are to be provided with incentives to action and protected from the impact of measures taken by others. To help inform international negotiations of measures to achieve these goals we develop a technique for endogenously estimating the allowance allocations and associated financial transfers necessary to achieve predetermined distributional outcomes and apply it in the MIT Emissions Prediction and Policy Analysis (EPPA) model. Possible burden sharing agreements are represented by different allowance allocations (and resulting financial flows) in a global cap-and-trade system. Cases studied include agreements that allocate the burden based on simple allocation rules found in current national proposals and alternatives that specify national equity goals for both developing and developed countries. The analysis shows the ambitious nature of this reduction goal: universal participation will be necessary and the welfare costs can be both substantial and wildly different across regions depending on the allocation method chosen. The choice of allocation rule is shown to affect the magnitude of the task and required emissions price because of income effects. If developing countries are fully compensated for the costs of mitigation then the welfare costs to developed countries, if shared equally, are around 2% in 2020, rising to some 10% in 2050, and the implied financial transfers are large—over $400 billion per year in 2020 and rising to around$3 trillion in 2050. For success in dealing with the climate threat any negotiation of long-term goals and paths to achievement need to be grounded in a full understanding of the substantial amounts at stake.Development of the EPPA model used has been supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and U.S. National Science Foundation, and by a consortium of industry and foundation sponsors of the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change

Burden Sharing in Climate Change Policy

Klimaveränderung, Internationale, Umweltpolitik, Welt, Climate change, International environmental policy, World

Common Capital: A Thought Experiment in Cross-Border Resolution

Cross-border bank resolution efforts focus on burden-sharing between bank owners, private creditors and the public. There is little talk of burden-sharing among governments, despite the rich history of governments trying to stick one another with the cost of financial conglomerate failures. There is an unspoken fear that acknowledging the need to allocate losses among governments would undermine post-crisis pledges of No More Bailouts. This symposium essay argues for making government stakes in private financial firms more transparent, and for using the contingent public share as a key to loss allocation among governments in cross-border banking crises

European Climate Policy: Burden Sharing after 2012

Regardless of whether or not the Kyoto Protocol enters into force, the EU may decide to set itself a long-term greenhouse gas emission target and thus to continue its leadership role in international climate policy. As for the first commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol, the EU may decide on a burden-sharing agreement as an integral part of such a long-term climate policy. Against this background I analyse three different options to distribute an overall budget of emission entitlements until 2042 among the member states of an enlarged EU. It is shown who wins and who loses with regard to compliance costs. As the member states' attitudes towards the different approaches are likely to depend on the relative attractiveness of the allocation options, a relevance threshold is introduced which may help to predict and understand the complexity of future climate negotiations in Europe.accession countries, allocation of GHG emission entitlements, burden sharing, European climate policy, EU-enlargement, future commitment periods, Environmental Economics and Policy, Q25, Q28,

What makes ISAF s/tick: An investigation of the politics of coalition burden-sharing

This paper is interested in conceptualising the often raised issue of over- and under-contributing in coalition operations; that of how and why members of complex coalitions2 may be punching above and below their weight, respectively. To this end, the first section presents a parsimonious baseline assumption regarding what variables may fundamentally inform coalition burden-sharing, to subsequently discuss how much each of these are found to play a role in the Afghanistan context. The second section elaborates on this by assessing the perception and the interpretation of threats by coalition member countries, related to Afghanistan, as this pertains to prioritising other variables within the scheme outlined in the previous section. The third and fourth sections then proceed to examine and further enrich the existing literature on coalition burden-sharing, and provide further insights regarding the operations of the International Security Assistance Force–Afghanistan, and regarding ISAF member-country decisionmaking; the objective here is to generate further refined assumptions, that can permit a preliminary assessment of the phenomenon of uneven burden-sharing in ISAF, complementing the initial baseline expectations