Correcting scope makes the Development Programme and the World Bank converge, so that on the quantity they both measure the United Nations and the Bank agree
Claim ID
CH1-001
Exact or summary claim
Correcting scope makes the Development Programme and the World Bank converge, so that on the quantity they both measure the United Nations and the Bank agree
Destination
Chapter 1
Status
SUPERSEDED
Source
UNDP, The Impact of the Conflict in Syria, 24 February 2025, annexe I-2
Source type
Official assessment, primary document opened
Published
2025-02-24
Accessed
2026-08-10
Measure and scope
The claim compared UNDP's US$123.3 billion of destroyed capital with the Bank's US$108 billion of direct damage and found them within about 14 per cent. The arithmetic is right and the inference is not
Known conflict
Three defects, any one of which is fatal to the inference. The figures sit on different price bases: the Bank standardises to December 2024 US dollars, and the UNDP total is anchored on ESCWA's 2020 estimate. They cover different periods: the Bank covers 2011 to 2024, and the largest UNDP component covers 2011 to 2018 with two later items added. And they are not independent, because US$5.1 billion of the UNDP total is a World Bank earthquake estimate. The apparent corroboration partly contains the corroborator
Specialist
None
Downstream
Chapter 1 section on convergence; source manuscript line 159; any later use of the two figures as mutual support
Action
Do not present as agreement between two institutions. State the composition of the UNDP figure and let the reader see why the closeness is not evidence