UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon “has instructed senior managers to prepare a budget with a 3 percent reduction as compared with the previous budget,” UN spokesman Martin Nesirky said Wednesday.
The reduction would save a stunning 5,4 billion US dollar (29 milliarder DKR), the spokesman said in New York at the daily UN news briefing.
The secretary-general has stressed to his senior advisors that they should be creative in seeing where they can find savings, he said.
The final budget will be approved by the UN general assembly. The secretary general has sought to cut the budget in the past but on at least one occasion, member states voted for a raise.
The US is the biggest single contributor to the UN, paying more than 20 percent of its budget, which does not include the multi-billion dollar cost of peacekeeping and other specialist activities.
The calls for UN cost-cutting come as some Republican members in the US Congress step up complaints about the UN as a bloated (oppustet) bureaucracy.
The House of Representatives earlier this year rejected a Republican-led effort to force the UN to give the US back 179 million dollar it made in overpayments as a member of the world body.
Kilde:www.worldbank.org
