My colleague and friend James Vreeland has been blogging a great deal about something he knows a great deal about: the upcoming IMF/World Bank meetings and the possibility/desirability of reform. His posts are both informative and provocative. I’ll post the beginning of today’s post here but you should go to The Vreelander for more:
Every two years, representatives of countries from all over the world gather in Washington, DC to elect two committees that partly rule the world on global economic policy. This year, the meetings are coming right up this weekend: October 8-10.
Usually, these elections just rubber stamp the same old usual suspects who have been running things for decades. But the 2008 Finance Crisis has obvious changes in world order. We are now living in a multipolar world, and the emerging market countries have arrived. This time around, they are going to be looking for a bigger share of global governance.
The committees I’m talking about are the Executive Boards of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, two of the world’s most powerful international organizations. Who controls these institutions? Well, every member-country has some share of the votes, and with 187 countries as members, technically, the IMF and the World Bank are accountable to nearly all of the citizens of the world. But, in reality, the real governance is run by a handful of key countries.
Basically, you’ve got 187 member-countries that elect 24-member Executive Boards (one for the IMF and one for the World Bank). Do each of the 187 countries get one vote? No, no, no – this isn’t the United Nations. Rather, the share of votes is explicitly tied to economic size. So, the mighty United States has the largest share (16.74%), and tiny Tuvalu has the smallest share (0.012%).
For more: click here