国际英语新闻：UN General Assembly adopts 5.16-billion-dollar budget for 2010-2011

UNITED NATIONS, Dec. 24 (Xinhua) -- The UN General Assembly (GA) has adopted a 5.16-billion-U.S. dollar budget for the United Nations 2010-2011 biennium, maintaining current scale of assessment for regular budget, peacekeeping, the spokesman for the GA president, Jean Victor Nkolo said here Thursday.

    In his email message to the press here, Nkolo said that the 64th General Assembly session concluded the main part of its substantive session with the adoption of the budget.

    The GA took the action in "a resolution that maintains the current scale by which States are assessed dues to the Organization, reflecting a compromise between the need to review that formula and maintain a balanced approach to assessments," a GA press release said.

    "The secretary-general would like to express his appreciation to Member States for the approval of the program budget," said a statement issued here Thursday by the spokesman for UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.

    The Fifth Committee of the GA, which is in charge of administrative and budgetary affairs, emerged from lengthy negotiations in the very morning on Wednesday to recommend a 5.16-billion-U.S. budget for the world body for 2010-2011, suggesting that Member States retain the formula currently used to determine State's contribution to the regular budget. Similarly, it recommended that the formula for assessing contributions to peacekeeping operations stay the same.

    The framework of the formula, reached in the final hours of negotiation, had been a major subject of discussion within the Fifth Committee near the end of the session, with the current policy due to expire at the end of 2009.

    Approved by a vote, the scale of assessments for the regular budget reflects a country's capacity to pay, measured by such factors as a country's national income and size of population.

    Assessments would be based on estimates of gross national income that were converted into U.S. dollars using market exchange rates, except where that would cause excessive fluctuations and distortions in the income of some Member States.

    The regular budget of the United Nations is approved by the General Assembly for a two-year period. The main source of funds for the budget is the contributions of Member States.