Reform of the United Nations Security Council: Equity and Efficiency Matthew Gould†
[email protected] Matthew D. Rablen††
[email protected] October 2016 Abstract The United Nations Security Council (UNSC) is critical to global peace and security, yet more than twenty years of negotiations over its reform have proved fruitless. We use recent advances in the theory of a-priori voting power to present a formal quantitative appraisal of the implications for democratic equity and efficiency of the “structural reforms” contained within eleven current reform proposals, as well as the separate effect of expansion of the UNSC membership. Only two reform proposals – the EU acting as a single entity, or a weakening of the veto power for Permanent Members – robustly dominate the status quo against our measures of equity and efficiency. Several proposed structural reforms may actually worsen the issues they ostensibly claim to resolve. JEL Classification: D72; D71; C71; C63 Keywords: United Nations, United Nations Security Council, United Nations Security Council reform, equity, efficiency, voting power, square-root rule. Acknowledgements: We thank Vera Eichenauer, the participants of the European Public Choice Society Annual Conference (Groningen), and the participants of the Voting Power Analysis with Reference to Institutions of Global Governance workshop (Warwick) for helpful comments on earlier versions of the paper. Gould thanks the University of Westminster for financial support. † Westminster Business School, University of Westminster, 35 Marylebone Road, London, NW1 5LS, UK. †† Department of Economics, University of Sheffield, 9 Mappin Street, Sheffield, S1 4DT, UK. “No reform of the UN will be complete without the reform of the Security Council” - Former Secretary-General of the United Nations Kofi Annan 1.