Flows Observatory
Methodology

1. Editorial Principle

All figures in the Flows Observatory are derived exclusively from primary public sources, official statistical publications of United Nations bodies and, for the per-capita and %-of-GDP charts, the World Bank. Publish What You Fund scores are cited as published for context. Flows is an independent single-author study; the author worked at UNDP, WHO and UNICEF in the past. No data has been estimated, imputed, or obtained from internal or confidential sources. Where source data contains gaps, those gaps are documented and reported as gaps, not filled.

This methodology document is intended to allow any researcher, journalist, or data analyst to independently replicate every figure in the observatory from the primary sources cited. If any figure cannot be replicated from the cited primary source, please contact Carta Blanca Labs.

2. Primary Data Sources

3. Master figures (flows.json)

Every headline figure on the site is read from one file, flows.json, generated by a single script from the CEB downloads. No headline figure is typed by hand into a page. The table below is that file; the ⓘ shows the limitation of each figure.

4. Key Calculations

4.1 Earmarking ratio, core share and unrestricted funding

Computed as Earmarked revenue ÷ Total revenue per year, per entity. Earmarked revenue is the CEB sub-type "Earmarked voluntary contributions" (rev_type = EAVC). Total revenue includes all CEB-classified revenue types. Values are in USD millions as reported; no currency conversion has been applied to non-USD-denominated entries (the CEB converts to USD at the time of publication).

Core share is reported with two denominators, both in flows.json: core ÷ total revenue (7.8% in 2024, includes assessed contributions) and core ÷ (core + earmarked voluntary) (11.4%), the basis used in Funding Compact reporting; the Agency Lens adds a third, government contributors only, from the financing instruments file. Unrestricted funding (assessed plus core) fell from 44.1% of total revenue in 2011 to 28.0% in 2024. The 2024 value of the core share is not the series minimum (7.7% in 2020).

4.2 Direct bilateral government HHI (excludes pooled funds and EU channels)

Computed annually as Σ(sᵢ²) where sᵢ is the share of each government contributor as listed by the CEB in total government contributions, in percentage points. It measures the concentration of direct bilateral government funding only: inter-agency pooled funds, EU channels, private and multilateral sources are not in the denominator. The 1,000 and 2,500 reference lines are the US DOJ merger thresholds, used here only as a scale, not as a judgement of what is acceptable.

4.3 US share of each entity's government contributions

Computed as US contributions to entity ÷ all government contributions to entity, 2024, both from CEB Revenue by Government Donor. One denominator is used on every page. Earlier versions mixed this with a total-revenue denominator; that series has been removed.

4.4 Resources tagged by SDG (expenditure, or budget where only budget is reported)

One cleaning rule, build/sdgclean.py, is shared by flows.json and lens.json: goal-level rows that equal 0.95 to 1.05 times the sum of their target-level rows are dropped as subtotals (see the exceptions list below); unassigned rows (x00) are excluded; for each entity and year, expenditure (EXP) rows are used and budget (BUD) rows only where that entity-year reports no expenditure (ILO, IOM, ITLOS, ITU, WFP, WIPO always; UNHCR in 2019-2022). Budget and expenditure are never summed for the same entity-year. The headline range, 69×, is therefore labelled "resources tagged by SDG"; on expenditure rows only it is 62×. A test (build/reconcile_test.py) fails the build if lens.json and flows.json disagree.

4.5 Expenditure without a comparable functional breakdown

Country-level expenditure with function = NA. The CEB expenditure-by-function series starts in 2018 (incomplete in 2018-2019, complete from 2020): earlier years have no comparable breakdown into humanitarian, development, peace or normative functions. It is a series break in the published data, not unaccounted spending and not a reporting failure. All of it falls in 2013–2019.

4.7 Country growth 2017 to 2024

Changes in UN expenditure by country exclude UN peacekeeping (DPO), which reports by country only from 2019 (2013-2018 recorded as "Global and Interregional"). Including it would compare a 2017 figure without peacekeeping with a 2024 figure that has it: Mali, the Central African Republic and the DRC showed +406%, +409% and +241% on that basis in the previous version; excluding DPO they are +38%, +18% and +88%. Ukraine (+712%) is unaffected. No cause is inferred from the change.

4.8 Revenue growth

+72% nominal, 34 to 48 reporting entities; +69% at constant perimeter (entities reporting in both 2011 and 2024); a real-terms figure in 2024 dollars is not computed in this build (no US GDP deflator or CPI series available offline).

4.9 Funding Compact perimeter (UNDS) and archetypes

The Agency Lens scores an entity against the Funding Compact only if it is a member of the UN Sustainable Development Group (UNSDG). Source: UNSDG member list, DCO website, checked 2026-11-01 (38 members, 25 of them in the CEB financial data), https://undco-p-unsdg-webapp.azurewebsites.net/about/who-we-are. Of the 48 CEB entities, 25 are UNSDG members (FAO, IFAD, ILO, IOM, ITC, ITU, UNAIDS, UNCDF, UNDP, UNEP, UNESCO, UNFPA, UNHABITAT, UNHCR, UNICEF, UNIDO, UNODC, UNOPS, UNRWA, UNV, UNWOMEN, WFP, WHO, WIPO, WMO); the other 23 are shown for context and marked not applicable. UN Tourism was listed as UNWTO in older UNSDG lists (2022) but is not on the current DCO page; Flows treats it as outside the perimeter. PAHO is the regional office of WHO, not a separate UNSDG member; Flows treats it as outside the perimeter. Earlier versions (v1.5) used a wider list of 36 entities; it is corrected here. Archetypes are Flows' working classification into nine groups, not an official UN typology: Funds and programmes (11); Humanitarian (4); Specialised agencies (normative, mainly assessed) (13); Financing mechanisms (3); Fee-funded (2); Training and research (4); Treaty bodies (6); Judicial bodies (3); Secretariat and peace operations (2).

4.6 Salary scale (removed in v1.5)

Earlier versions showed the International Civil Service Commission net base salary scale as context. It is outside the CEB perimeter of this study and has been removed; no salary figure appears on the site.

5. Series breaks

Where a published series starts, stops or changes definition. Comparisons across a break are not made on this site.

6. Label harmonisation and labels kept as listed

Government contributor labels are kept verbatim as listed by the CEB, including the asterisks that refer to CEB footnotes ("Kosovo**", "Taiwan (Province of China)***"); the CSV download carries no footnote text, so none is reproduced here. Two spelling variants are harmonised for display only, and the staff lists of the Observatory merge three HR labels. The full mapping, with the amounts affected, is also in flows.json (meta.label_harmonisation).

Labels the CEB itself lists under two spellings in different years, kept and counted as listed (the contributor count of 230 would be 228 if they were merged):

7. Exceptions: rows removed before computation

Rows of the CEB SDG file dropped by build/sdgclean.py, applied identically to flows.json and lens.json.

8. Download the cleaned tables

The tables below are generated by the same script as flows.json and are the frames behind every figure on the site (CSV, UTF-8, nominal USD).

• revenue_by_entity_year.csv: CEB Financial Statistics, revenue by entity, year and type, 2011–2024
• government_contributors_by_entity_year.csv: CEB Revenue by Government Donor, labels as listed by the CEB, 2013–2024
• sdg_clean.csv: CEB Expenditure by SDG after the cleaning rule above, 2018–2024
• expenditure_country_function.csv: CEB Expenditure by country, region and function, 2013–2024
• flows.json · lens.json · changelog

9. Known Limitations and Gaps

10. What This Observatory Does Not Claim

• It does not claim that any expenditure pattern reflects deliberate policy decisions by individuals
• It does not assess the performance of any entity against the Funding Compact; the Agency Lens shows CEB-based approximations and distances to system-level targets only
• It does not claim that the earmarking trend reflects donor bad faith
• It does not make policy recommendations
• It does not use any data obtained from confidential or internal sources
• It does not represent the views of any government, organisation, or employer

11. Reproducibility

All source data is publicly downloadable from the URLs listed in Section 2. The aggregation logic is documented in this note, and every headline figure is stored with its formula in flows.json. Recomputed automatically from the CSV files on 2026-11-01; no external human review yet. Carta Blanca Labs welcomes external review and will respond to queries about specific calculations.

The observatory was built using Python (data processing), Chart.js 4.4.1 (visualisation), and standard HTML/CSS. No proprietary software or restricted APIs were used.

12. Related work and official sources

Flows reads the same public series that these institutions publish or analyse. They are listed here for readers who want the primary context.

• UN System Chief Executives Board (CEB), financial and HR statistics
• UN Sustainable Development Group, home of the Funding Compact
• Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation, co-publisher of the annual report on financing the UN development system
• Multi-Partner Trust Fund Office (MPTF Office), pooled funds data
• MOPAN, assessments of multilateral organisations
• UN Joint Inspection Unit
• International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI)
• Publish What You Fund, Aid Transparency Index
• OECD, multilateral development finance

Official websites of the 48 entities covered:

• CTBTO
• FAO
• IAEA
• IARC
• ICAO
• ICC
• IFAD
• ILO
• IMO
• IOM
• IRMCT
• ISA
• ITC
• ITLOS
• ITU
• OPCW
• PAHO
• UN Peacekeeping (DPO)
• UN Secretariat
• UN Tourism
• UN Women
• UN-Habitat
• UNAIDS
• UNCCD
• UNCDF
• UNDP
• UNEP
• UNESCO
• UNFCCC
• UNFPA
• UNHCR
• UNICEF
• UNICRI
• UNIDO
• UNITAID
• UNITAR
• UNODC
• UNOPS
• UNRWA
• UNSSC
• UNU
• UNV
• UPU
• WFP
• WHO
• WIPO
• WMO
• WTO