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The Political Economy of IMF Voting Power and Quotas Brock Blomberg Claremont McKenna College J. Lawrence Broz University of California, San Diego∗ JEL Codes: Keywords: Political Economy, International Monetary Fund, IMF, Redistribution First Version: October 11, 2006 This Version: August 23, 2007 ∗Brock Blomberg, Department of Economics, Claremont McKenna College, Claremont, CA 91711. E- mail: bblomberg@, tel: (909) 607-2654. J. Lawrence Broz, Department of Political Science, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093-0521. E-mail: jlbroz@, tel: (858) 822- 5750. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the International Political Economy Society (IPES) Conference, Princeton University, November 17-18, 2006. We thank conference participants for excellent comments. Abstract We explore the governance structure of the International Monetary Fund, wherein voting power is explicitly tied to the size of member countries’ financial contributions, known as “quotas.” By virtue of their large quotas, rich countries have the preponder- ance of voting power while developing countries are left to complain about a “demo- cratic deficit” that leaves them with little influence over the IMF’s policies and pro- grams. We develop a model that recognizes the bifurcation of members into industrial- country creditors and developing-country borrowers and treats the IMF as an inter- national government that provides collective insurance against balance-of-pa