Estimates of the cost of the attacks that destroyed the World Trade Center in New York, and took close to 3,000 lives, continue to mount and now are placed at more than $151 billion. That number does not fully take into account the peripheral losses to businesses and in jobs. It's virtually impossible to determine this with reasonable accuracy because the impact is scattered. Although Alan Greenspan, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, and other competent authorities now believe that the economic recession is about over and that the next few months should see a sharp improvement, unemployment totals remain high. Some jobless people have stopped looking for work after repeated frustrations. Meanwhile, Wall Street and the overseas bourses continue to behave like a Coney Island roller coaster: up one week, down the next.

Against this backdrop, the United Nations appears in remarkably good shape: Trim, fit and ready to roll once its priorities have been reordered to give the principal issues that used to predominate at least equal time against the wall of worry created by Osama bin Laden and al- Qaeda. But let's not get carried away by the UN's healthy recovery. There's not an institution on Earth, not even the Vatican with its direct line to heaven, that doesn't have to combat a few problems.

After years of struggling in red ink, the organization ended 2001 solidly in the black, thanks to a change of heart in Washington and some other capitals that brought a flood of cash from states that formerly held up payment of their dues. Some of that money has gone to poor countries that supplied troops and material for UN peacekeeping operations and had been kept waiting years for reimbursement. Some has gone for the most pressing needs of other impoverished states.

Considering the immense amount of good it does in the world, all but the most curmudgeonly critics would have to acknowledge that the organization is a bargain. Comparisons can be odious, but let's make a few anyway, bearing in mind that the UN's annual regular budget is about $1.2 billion, which, as is often noted, is about what a small US city spends per year on public services.

The New York-based Global Policy Forum, which gathered some data on global expenditures from various sources about the time of the Summit Millennium when the US was heavily in debt to the world body and was being called its worst deadbeat member, concluded: "The sums spent by and owed to the UN are extremely small by comparison with other financial transactions and government spending."

For example, the Bank of International Settlements estimated that trading per day in currencies came in at $1.49 trillion, while SIPRI (a Stockholm peace research body) placed world military spending in 1999 at $719 billion. So far, the Bush administration has shown no inclination to rescue with government funds the victims of the Enron scandal, but that was not the case after the failure of several important US savings and loan institutions in the late 1990s. The Wall Street Journal estimated that the government's bailout of that industry cost $200 billion. Earlier, the collapse of the peso and its economic and social consequences caused the US to go to Mexico's aid to the tune of $12.5 billion‹compliments of the American taxpayer.

But it's not only the US that is generous with its citizens' hard-earned cash. The French government spent $9.3 billion to save the Credit Lyonnais bank, according to The New York Times; the Korean government bailed out Hanbo Steel and its creditors in 1997; and the German government provided a $6.7 billion subsidy to the Dow Chemical Company for investments in East Germany. Reuters reported that in 1997 Israel and Egypt (believed to be Uncle Sam's biggest foreign beneficiaries) shared $5.1 billion in US aid. That number may have been exceeded in more recent cash transfers from Washington. Another comparison often made in the UN-vs.-the-real-world debate is between the budget of the New York City police department and the organization's. In 2000, New York's finest cost the taxpayer $2.5 billion‹some of which went for protection for some 140 heads of state or government who descended on the UN for the millennium meeting of the General Assembly that September.

Even before Sept. 11, 2001, there were fears that the financial and economic sights for third-world recovery had been set too high and that this would prove an impossible goal. To improve the prospect of success in this effort‹which was endorsed at the time by President Bill Clinton‹would require an element of mild sacrifice on the part of citizens of the US, along with those of other developed nations. But President George W. Bush has said that he will not demand that Americans make sacrifices. Nor does the word trip easily from the tongue of any democratic officeholder anywhere, with elections to contend with. (In an energy crisis during his presidency, Jimmy Carter was widely ridiculed for wearing an extra sweater in a TV appearance as he called on Americans to turn down their thermostats and think up conservation measures.)

Sacrifice or not, James Wolfensohn, the former Wall Street financier who heads the World Bank, estimates that it will take on the order of an additional $40 to $60 billion a year to reach the UN's Millennium Development Goals. This represents a virtual doubling of current foreign aid flows. In remarks made recently at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, in Washington, Wolfensohn reminded the leaders of recipient nations of their obligation to pursue sound policies in return for promises of aid. He certainly had in mind lingering stories of corrupt African and other third world presidents salting away billions in Swiss numbered accounts‹money donated as foreign aid to improve national economies and ease the misery of their poor when, at the height of the cold war, America and the Soviet Union were competing for influence in developing countries and using every available means to obtain it.

These tales of rotten billionaires like the late Sese Seke Mobutu of the Congo have made many potential donors wary about increasing aid totals today. The anecdotal evidence is trotted out routinely by US critics of no-strings attached assistance to developing countries. But Poul Nielson, the European Union's commissioner for development, believes the litany is exaggerated and should not be allowed to influence or curb aid levels in 2002, when many former authoritarian, self-serving rulers have been displaced by freely elected successors.

Nielson's country, Denmark, is one of the few industrialized states committed to contributing 0.7 percent of their GNP to foreign aid, a target approved by the UN. All of these generous donor states tax their citizens at levels that the US and the UK would consider punitive. Nielson noted, however, that a virtual cradle-to-grave welfare system provides powerful payback, as is the case in the other states that have attained the UN goal. But, for the rest of the rich countries, a doubling of foreign aid cannot happen overnight, says Wolfensohn. He proposed therefore in his Woodrow Wilson Center lecture that they phase in the badly needed extra cash gradually: say, adding another $10 billion a year for the next five years, building up to $50 billion in the final year.

Wolfensohn also wants rich nations to open their markets wider for imports from developing countries and to cut the handsome subsidies that many of them now provide to domestic agriculture. The bank chief, who was Clinton's nominee for the post, likes the European Union's decision to open its members' markets to everything except armaments. This "Everything But Arms" agreement should be followed by others, and the benefits extended to all low-income countries in order to end trade barriers that harm the poorest nations and the poorest workers, he told the Washington audience. There's no need to wait for an OK by the World Trade Organization, he advised. The WTO, which will be represented at the Monterrey summit this month (a historic first), will have to handle a complaint by angry steel-producing countries affected by President Bush's decision to slap tariffs on their exports of the metal as a measure to protect the troubled US steel industry. The action may hit American consumers in their wallets and pocketbooks if steel products like automobiles and refrigerators wind up costing more. As members of Nafta, Mexico and Canada are exempted from the measure, but Brazil is among developing-country producers deeply grieved by the move. Cynics say it was prompted primarily by a White House attempt to improve the Republican Party's prospects in fall elections in key steel-producing states where industry-related unemployment levels are now high. The liberal Wolfensohn's take is different. "It is the task of political leaders," he says, "to remind electorates that lowering of trade barriers will not cost the rich countries anything in the aggregate; they gain from freer trade in these areas."

On agricultural subsidies, which he hotly opposes, he says that these go mainly to a relatively small number of agribusinesses, many of them large corporations. "Yet those subsidies are six times what the rich countries provide in foreign aid to a developing world that includes five billion people," he estimates. Though powerful political lobbies are ranged against lifting those subsidies, the fundamental truth of the matter, he says, is that significant subsidizing constitutes a heavy burden on consumers in developed countries.

In his pitch for more foreign aid, Wolfensohn argues that helping the poor is actually an excellent investment for long-term peace and that it's already shown results. He points out that the world's poor population shrank by 200 million in the past 22 years, even as total population grew by 1.6 billion‹with the biggest growth in the developing countries of Africa and Asia.

Demonstrations against the participants in the World Economic Forum's Annual Meeting‹which was switched to New York this year in a gesture of support by Klaus Schwab, its guiding spirit, in the wake of the devastation done to Manhattan's downtown‹were mild compared with the havoc caused in earlier anti-globalization protests in Seattle, Prague and Genoa. Anyway, the average New Yorker did not welcome Schwab's friendly act, and notwithstanding Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's expressed hope that the WEF might make this an annual trip, the city's relief was widespread over news that this was a one-off, not to be repeated. In 2003 the Forum plans to be back in its familiar Alpine Swiss snuggery, Davos.

How great a factor in the incitement of terrorism is the plight of the economically disadvantaged mass of humanity, those millions of uneducated, physically ailing, impoverished inhabitants of developing countries who subsist on as little as $1 a day, and for whose children going to bed hungry is a nightly fact of life?

Some American commentators have downplayed the link, pointing out (correctly) that the hijackers who turned three transcontinental jetliners into lethal weapons six months ago were mainly middle-class or upper-middle class Arabs and that their suspected inspiration, Osama bin Laden, is a multimillionaire whose family‹which reportedly has disowned him‹runs the biggest construction company in oil-rich Saudi Arabia.

However, it's also been pointed out that terrorists of whatever stripe do not have to be poor themselves to feel a fierce hatred for affluent Americans. Secretary General Kofi A. Annan seems unable to quite make up his mind about the linkage, how powerful it may be or whether it exists as a certainty. Having seemed, in earlier statements, to have seen a connection, he said the other day that this was not necessarily so and that terrorist assaults might have other motivations, including a response to corrupt political and military leaders.

In remarks to the Council on Foreign Relations, the Secretary General observed, "The poor have enough burdens without being considered likely terrorists simply because they are poor."

Without blaming the US directly, he spoke of the mistakes made in leaving Afghanistan to its own devices to stew after the withdrawal of Soviet forces a dozen years ago‹a hands-off decision, he implied, that opened the door to Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda terrorist organization and allowed them to set up shop in the country and make common cause with the Taliban. These Afghan Islamist extremists who seized political control of most of the country never were recognized by the UN as a government and were not represented in the world body.

Until shortly after Sept. 11, a Taliban official resident in Queens maintained contacts with UN sympathizers and others willing to hear him out. The interim government led by Hamid Karzai now has claimed the Afghan seat. Since the World Trade Organization meetings in Doha in the Gulf state of Qatar last year and in advance of the Monterrey and Johannesburg summits, Annan has been trying hard to move sustainable development, debt forgiveness for the poorest countries and closely related issues higher up the agenda, sensing that the current obsession with terrorism, Afghanistan and, more recently, the "axis of evil" mentioned in President Bush's State of the Union Address, threatened to skew priorities.

As a Ghanaian, the Secretary General has a special concern for Africa, the worst affected continent in virtually every way, not least by the AIDS scourge (about which, more later). With Africa in mind, but not only Africa, he spoke at the London School of Economics last month about "the multiple hardships to which so many of our fellow human beings are subjected, each of which makes it harder to escape from the others." These hardships he identified as poverty, hunger, disease, oppression, conflict, pollution and the depletion of natural resources." "Development means enabling people to escape from that vicious circle," Annan said. But, like the struggle of so many poor countries for independence (from colonial rule), the struggle for development has to be carried on in developing lands mainly by their own citizens, he insisted. "Its first prerequisites are basic security, the rule of law, and honest, transparent administration, which only national governments can provide." Still, he said, it is a struggle that concerns the whole world, and developed countries have a strong interest in the outcome‹both in whether development succeeds and in the form it takes, he said.

"Poor people in poor countries are not asking for a handout," he assured his audience of intellectuals and business people from the City of London financial district. "What they want is a hand up. Indeed, the poor are enormous, untapped reservoirs of initiative and entrepreneurship, but their energies are often held in check by poverty, misrule or conflict. They would be the first to say that trade, not aid, is the path out of poverty."As it happened, that was the mantra of the first trade and development conference held by the UN in 1964, out of which grew the UN agency Unctad. Annan said it now is important to fulfill the promise agreed at the Doha conference of a "Development Round" of trade talks that would remove what he termed the unfair subsidies granted to producers in rich lands and then fully open their markets to labor-intensive exports from poor states. "Not only do these subsidies make it impossible for developing countries to compete; they also do great damage to the rich countries themselves," he said, "by perpetuating unsustainable practices in farming, transport and energy use."

Like the World Bank's Wolfensohn in his address a few days afterward, the Secretary General said he foresees that powerful interest groups and lobbyists within the rich nations will try to block meaningful concessions to the developing world, employing arguments like the one that the interests of workers and farmers would have to be sacrificed. He urged political and business leaders in the developed world to rise above such "special pleading and narrow sectoral interests."

US Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill believes that focusing on the results of development aid rather than the size of the package would bring recipient nations closer to sustainable economic growth than would simply raising the level of aid flows. He made the Bush administration's position clear on this point during a roundtable discussion in Washington last month, looking forward to the Monterrey session and the Johannesburg finale.

The US has offered to increase its contribution to the World Bank's International Development Association funding, known as IDA, on condition that priorities for education and public health are fulfilled. The administration also wants the World Bank to convert half of its development loans to grants.

In summarizing the roundtable debate a release by the US Mission to the European Union, which keeps that 15-nation group abreast of Washington doings, and vice versa, acknowledged that while many of the participants agreed that new, innovative proposals are required to address the needs and aspirations of developing countries, O'Neill's ideas were not shared universally.

While agreeing that the private sector must be the source for most additional development financing, Norway's International Development Minister Hilde Johnson, one of those present, was quoted as stating that private investment cannot solve the problem of under-funding. Meanwhile, Allan Meltzer of Carnegie-Mellon University proposed at the roundtable that multilateral institutions and donor nations move away from emerging markets capable of borrowing privately in order to send more money to the poorest countries that do not have that capacity to obtain credit. "Only then will we see if we need more assistance," he said, according to the US Mission paper.

Observing that the World Bank has determined where official development assistance (ODA) works best, Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, a professor at Columbia University, said, "We can double the money for ODA, and we know we can spend it well." (This was some weeks before Wolfensohn's lecture.) US official Alan Larson was reported to have suggested tapping an estimated $1 to $2 trillion in hidden domestic capital in poor countries as a means of raising more funds for development than ever would come from foreign investments. He advised poor countries to be sure to create an environment based on the rule of law, enforceable contracts and transparency, saying that only then would they be able to unlock domestic capital and attract foreign funds.

Mexican Finance Secretary Francisco Gil-Diaz was said to have endorsed this view, mentioning Mexico's housing market as an example of the inefficient use of domestic resources. Thousands of people have to pay more to build homes with their own savings because of the paucity of enforceable contracts. Also, mortgage cash is scarce in Mexico. Back to globalization. Good or bad? Nitin Desai, the UN Under Secretary General for Economic and Social Affairs, traces the phase of unquestioning approval to pre-1997, when, he says, there was "the general assumption that globalization was improving the global growth rate through increased trade and financial flows." It was seen essentially as having a beneficial impact on the processes of growth and development, "despite concerns about marginalization and the neglect of certain social and environmental dimensions."

Then came the Asian economic crisis and "we had the first doubts," Desai recalls in the text of a statement he made to a committee of the General Assembly last October, when the aftermath of the terrorist attacks was much on the members' minds amid fears about the possible short- and long term effects of the outrage."

"But in some ways the world economy came out of the 1997-1998 crisis reasonably well, with the processes of growth reviving by 1999 and 2000," Desai says consolingly. "The reason for that was precisely globalization," he emphasizes.

Because growth processes were strongly maintained in the US, particularly, it was possible for many of the countries affected by the crisis of 1997 1998 to recover quickly. The globalization of finance contributed to the strong growth of the US economy, while the globalization of production made international trade a more powerful mechanism for transmitting this stimulus from the US to the rest of the world. So one could say that in its first major test, globalization accelerated the recovery from the crisis." Annan is the first secretary general to have made an intense, determined attempt to engage private business in support of the UN and the economic and social causes the world body has espoused and promoted. As a result, and in reaction in part also to his personal character and charisma, many corporations have signed on to the Annan Global Compact, which sets out a number of principles that the UN considers to be good for business as well as for the planet, including its threatened natural environment.

For the secretary general, the campaign against HIV/AIDS is little short of a crusade‹not only because of the cruel impact of the pandemic in Africa, where there are fears of the decimation of an entire generation in the worst-affected nations. Caring for AIDS orphans is already a massive problem for relief organizations. There is never enough money.

Worried that the rampaging virus would exacerbate political and social instability in many states, the security council added the question to its agenda for debate‹the first time that a disease had been considered an appropriate subject for discussion in the context of peace or war. The General Assembly followed the Council's example with a special session on AIDS. The secretary general obtained approval for an international AIDS fund, for which he proposed a goal of up to $10 billion a year. Initially, pledges and contributions from rich nations flowed freely. When some priorities shifted dramatically after Sept. 11, the fund, along with many other charities in the US and abroad, suffered competitively.

Reaching Annan's target, or anything close to it, proved an impossibility. The organizers hope for better results in 2002, but the prospect is not good, given continuing demands imposed by so many projects related to the war on terrorism. On the brighter side of financing, as has been noted already, the UN ended 2001 in better shape than it's been in for years. For once, Joseph Connor, the chief financial officer, was spared having to raid the peacekeeping account in order to meet regular UN housekeeping expenses. As far as anything about Sept. 11 could be called a plus, this was a good outcome of the Bush administration's recognition that, in this unprecedented war, America needs foreign friends to combat foreign enemies.

Most of these friends are to be found at the UN (the enemies, too). In fact, the UN response to the New York and Washington disasters was swift, firm and clear, in Security Council and General Assembly resolutions and in a universal condemnation of terrorism in general and the attackers in particular‹including by representatives of states with no affection whatever for US political behavior.

For all the talk in recent years of "Uncle Sam, deadbeat"‹including by some of America's most reliable and usually polite allies at the height of the financial crisis‹it is by no means a new thing for members to pay late or allow arrears to accumulate. The New York-based Global Policy Forum notes, "The UN faced financial pressures in its earliest years."

In a background report on the subject, the Forum's research found that financing for peacekeeping caused trouble in that formative time. Matters got bad after 1956, when the first big peacekeeping operation was mounted in the Sinai in the wake of the withdrawal of British, French and Israeli troops upon the collapse of an ill-conceived Suez adventure masterminded by ailing British Prime Minister Anthony Eden. This was aimed at toppling Egyptian President Abdel Gamal Nasser, who had nationalized and seized control of the canal, one of the world's most vital waterways.

In the absence of Security Council agreement, a UN Emergency Force, UNEF, was cobbled together by the Canadian statesman Lester B. Pearson and Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold, after General Assembly approval, and dispatched to the Middle East. There was no clear precedent for who would pay for the venture, and some members declined to help foot the bill, arguing that states that caused the crisis should accept the financial consequences of their folly.

Four years later, policy differences about the UN's increasingly active peace mission prompted a number of member states to withhold funds. The Soviet Union led the list. That financial crisis was resolved through a UN bond issue to cover unpaid assessments. Some $169 million worth of paper was issued in 1962 and afterward. It was paid off from income raised by regular UN assessments.

Some states then withheld that portion of their dues that might be applied to bond service. Thus were born precedents for nonpayment on policy grounds, targeted withholding of assessed contributions and, subsequently, authorization for the UN to delay reimbursing states that provided troops and equipment for peacekeeping (in effect, requiring even very poor states to lend their limited resources to the Organization, not knowing when they might be repaid).

In 1965, members sought new solutions to persistent UN financial difficulties, instituting a Special Account, or reserve fund that expanded on the small working capital fund created 20 years earlier. A small, but still inadequate, financial cushion was found.

Ironically, in light of more recent events that now have culminated, happily, in the payment of most of Washington's dues, the US took the position in that period that UN assessments were a treaty obligation upon states and that, therefore, the nonpaying USSR was in contravention of the pact. The Global Policy Forum points to a change in the US position after nonaligned states members became a vocal majority in the UN. Many of these were perceived as more friendly to Moscow than to Washington.

"In 1981, when Ronald Reagan was elected president, he adopted a more hostile policy toward the UN," the background paper records. "The new administration turned for advice to conservative think tanks like the Heritage Foundation, which saw the UN as a propaganda arm of the Soviet Union, hostile to capitalism, and a springboard for third world radicalism." The Heritage Foundation proposed that the US reassert its control over the UN, either by holding back funding, on condition of certain UN "reforms," or by simply refusing to pay for objectionable programs.

This plan got under way in 1983, when an amendment to the UN appropriations bill written by Congressman Jack Kemp and Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan denied funds to UN programs that supported the Palestine Liberation Organization or the independent movement in South African-ruled Namibia, known as SWAPO. (Both lawmakers were members of the New York Congressional delegation, and Moynihan was a former ambassador to the UN. The future senator quit his UN job following a bitterly sarcastic attack on his diplomatic gunslinger's tactics‹a still-remembered "Wyatt Earp and the OK Corral" speech‹by the British representative, Ivor Richard, subsequently the Labor Party leader in the House of Lords.) Beginning in 1985, the US raised the ante. It abandoned Unesco, on the ground that the Paris-based agency was poorly managed and overly politicized. (Others saw a strong element of truth in the criticism but remained in Unesco, seeking change, which has occurred, though slowly. The US still has not rejoined. The UK under Margaret Thatcher also withdrew, along with Singapore. Now led by Laborite Tony Blair, the UK is back in.)

Because of withholdings of assessed dues, US arrears to the UN escalated in the mid-1980s to $86 million, and spending cuts and layoffs followed in New York. Also in 1985, the US administration delayed UN payments by appropriating funds in the following budget year, making these nine months late. (The UN requires members to pay their annual dues during January of a new year. Save for such firm supporters as the Nordic nations, few do.) Although the US in recent years has pressed for a reduction in its percentage share of the budget assessments, and was successful in the last outing on this subject by the General Assembly, back in October, 1985, Secretary of State George Schultz flatly rejected a proposal by Olof Palme, the Swedish prime minister (who was later assassinated), that the 25 percent cap on a country's UN contribution be lowered to 10 percent in order to reflect that "this Organization is the instrument of all nations." Germany responded that the heavily indebted US should either pay up or accept a lower assessment. As Reagan completed his second term, the US owed $308 million, a debt that mounted until, at its peak in 1994, it was $3.5 billion.

The first President Bush (like Moynihan, a former US ambassador) saw US arrears dwindle to $240 million in his final year, thanks in part to a change of heart by Congressional penny-pinchers grateful for the UN's useful role played before, during and after the Gulf War.

Then an economic crisis in the former Soviet bloc changed the terrain: Russia and Ukraine were among the leading delinquents.