Public voting on the process underway, have your say
May 20, 2011 1 Comment
The Guardian newspaper has a poll running until 24 May asking “Does the IMF voting process need to change?”. You can guess which way we voted, but right now only 71.3% of people agreed. Go to the poll to vote yourself.
And today, US think tank Center for Global Development launched an “IMF Leadership Selection Survey“, asking questions about the process, desired criteria, and possible candidates. It will certainly have a different audience than the Guardian poll, and comparing results might be interesting to see if the general public thinks differently than development policy wonks.
(Based on my longer comment at http://www.eg4health.org/2011/05/21/the-guardian-poll-on-imf-voting-reform-missing-the-point-but-still-worth-voting/)
The Guardian poll is very welcome – but the strap-line (“should the choice of a new boss reflect the shift in global economic power towards emerging markets?”) completely misses the point. The question isn’t whether the economic weighting attached to different countries’ votes should be changed – it is whether, in the 21st century, there is any justification for giving rich people or countries more votes than poor people at all; and whether the IMF’s voting system should seek to counter inequality economic power instead of reinforcing and entrenching it.
To ask the half of the world’s population who live neither in the North or in emerging markets whether IMF voting weights should reflect the growing economic power of emerging market economies is to ask them if they prefer their economies to be run by foreigners from the North or by foreigners from the East. Some choice!
It’s still well worth voting, to highlight the need for reform – but the results should not be interpreted as endorsing the principle of economic weighting.